Full text of "The Art Of The Mystery Story"

See other formats

THE ART OF THE

Mystery Story

A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS
EDITED AND WITH A COMMENTARY BY
HOWARD HAYCRAFT

The Universal Library

GROSSET & DUNLAP

NEW YORK

REPRObUGTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

BY ARRANGEMENT WITH HOWARD HAYGRAFT

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD

The purpose of this book is to bring together under one cover a
representative selection of the best critical and informative writing
about the modern mystery-crime-detective story, from Poe to the
present time. Ever since the day some five years ago that I ventured
to perpetrate a history of detective fiction,^ lovers of this variety
of literature have been writing me of the need for such a book.
Concurrently, the last few years have witnessed in the public prints
an outpouring of serious critical discussion of the once-lowly who-
dunit and its relations-by-marriage unequalled in any comparable
period in the loo-year history of the genre. In view of these circum-
stances, it seemed to my publishers and myself that the time had
arrived for the compilation of the first and definitive anthology
devoted solely to this aspect of the subject. It is our hope that the
resulting volume will serve equally well the uses of pleasure and
reference.

In choosing the material to be included, I have been guided by a
few simple but necessary rules-of-thumb which it may be helpful
to state. Except for certain historically obligatory selections in the
opening section, I have tried diligently throughout the volume to
avoid material that repeated too closely either the information ot
themes found in other selections. That this unavoidably ruled out
many otherwise fine essays and articles is the occasion of sincere
sorrow. (The anthologist's life, as every member of the profession
will testify, is a constant succession of hard choices and regret at
never having the space to include everything and everybody he
would like.) Some exclusions based on types of subject matter were
also found necessary. Thus, appreciations of individual authors
have had to be omitted as not quite germane to the principal con-
sideration (with two exceptions only: Poe and Doyle) and, likewise,
selections however excellent in themselves that were believed too

♦ Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of ike Detective Story (Hew York;
Appleton, 1041 ; London: Bavies, 19455).

vi Foreword

limited, specialized, or recondite for the general reader's interest.
Articles of a purely '‘How-To-Write-It" nature have been avoided,
both because this is a book for readers rather than writers of de-
tective stories, and because there is already a satisfactory collection
of such pieces available in the volume Writing Detective and
Mystery Fiction, edited by A. S. Burack (Boston: The Writer, Inc.,
1945). On the other hand, a chapter from Marie F. RodelFs text-
book Mystery Fiction: Theory & Technique (New York; Duell,
Sloan & Pearce, 1943) has been given space because of the interest
of its subject matter to lay as well as professional readers.

So much for the principles of selection. The final choices for
inclusion simply represent (as they must in any anthology) the
editor's best judgment as to what the putative reader of the book
would like to find in it. Taste being the variable thing it is, anyone
else performing the same task would doubtless have chosen differ-
ently in many instances; quite possibly more wisely. I can only hope
that the reader who is disappointed by the omission of some per-
sonal favorite will be reimbursed by the discovery of new material
and delights he knew not of.

In addition to the formal acknowledgments at the end of the
book, I wish to thank specially those authors, critics, and editors
who so generously wrote original essays for this volume and
thereby increased inestimably whatever value it may possess: Erie
Stanley Gardner, Craig Rice, Anthony Boucher, Lee Wright, Isa-
belle Taylor, Richard Mealand, Ken Crossen, Lynch," and

Isaac Anderson. To several of these, and to Ellery Queen and James
Sandoe, I am additionally indebted for invaluable editorial advice
and assistance.

New York City

July, 1946

CONTENTS

1. Mystery Matures: The Higher Criticism

A Defence of Detective Stories by G. K. Chesterton 3

The Art of the Detective Story by R. Austin Freeman y

Crime and Detection by E. M, Wrong 18

The Great Detective Stories by Willard Huntington Wright 33
The Omnibus of Crime by Dorothy L, Sayers 71

The Professor and the Detective by Marjorie Nicolson 1 10

Masters of Mystery by H. Douglas Thomson 128

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes by Vincent Starr ett 146

Murder for Pleasure by Howard Hay craft 158

“Only a Detective Story” by Joseph Wood Krutch 178

2. The Rules of the Game

Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories by S. S, Van Dine 189
Detective Story Decalogue by Ronald A, Knox 194

The Detection Club Oath 197

3. Care and Feeding of the Whodunit

The Case of the Early Beginning by Erie Stanley Gardner 203
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers 208

The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler 222

Murder Makes Merry by Craig Rice 238

Trojan Horse Opera by Anthony Boucher 245

Dagger of the Mind by James Sandoe 250

Clues by Marie F. Rodell 264

The Locked-Room Lecture by John Dickson Carr 273

Command Performance by Lee Wright 287

Mystery Midwife: The Crime Editor's Job by Isabelle Taylor 292
Hollywoodunit by Richard Mealand 298

There's Murder in the Air by Ken Crossen 304

Tii

Vlll

Contents

4. The Lighter Side of Crime

Watson Was a Woman by Rex Stout 3 1 1

Don’t Guess, Let Me Tell You by Ogden Nash 319

The Pink Murder Case, by Christopher Ward 321

Murder at $2.50 a Crime by Stephen Leacock 327

Everything Under Control by Richard Armour 338

The Whistling Corpse by Ben Hecht 339

Oh, England! Full o£ Sin by Robert /. Casey 343

Murders and Motives by E. V. Lucas 352

Murder on Parnassus by Pierre Very 355

5. Critics’ Corner

The Life of Riley by Isaac Anderson 363

Battle of the Sexes: The Judge and His Wife Look at Mys-
teries by ''Judge Lynch'' 367

How to Read a Whodunit by Will Cuppy 373

Four Mystery Reviews 377

The Ethics of the Mystery Novel by Anthony Boucher 384

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? by Edmund Wilson 390
The Detective Story — Why? by Nicholas Blake 398

Leaves from the Editors’ Notebook by Ellery Queen 406

6. Detective Fiction vs. Real Life

From the Memoirs of a Private Detective by Dashiell Hammett 417
Inquest on Detective Stories by R. Philmore 423

TheXawyer Looks at Detective Fiction by J. B. Waite 436

The Crux of a Murder: Disposal of the Body by F. Sherwood

Taylor 447

7. Putting Crime on the Shelf

Collecting Detective Fiction by John Carter 453

The Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years by Ellery
Queen 476

Readers’ Guide to Crime by James Sandoe 492

Contents

’8. Watchman, Wjeiat of the Night? •

The Passing of the Detective in Literature 511

A Sober Word on the Detective Story by Harrison R, Steeves 513
The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley by Philip Van Doren
Stern 527

The Whodunit in World War II and After by Howard Hay-
craft 536

I0($0dcfo000 0 0 000000000 0l>0 0 0^000000000000000000000(

MYSTERY MATURES:
THE HIGHER CRITICISM

0 9 0 QP 0 0 p 0 p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.0 0 op 0 0 0 Qpii 0 P p 0 Q 0 0 OJtP 0 0 p 0 0 c

It is a literary truism that criticism follows creation. In the case of
the modern detective-crime-mystery story, criticism — as distin-
guished from the reviewing of individual works — took an inordi-
nately long time to catch up to original performance, Poe wrote the
first police story, as we know it, in 1841, Yet the earliest critical dis-
cussion of the genre as such that your editor has been able to dis-
cover appeared in the London Saturday Review for May 5, 188^, A
pallid and pointless effort at best, this unsigned pioneer editorial
contained no thought more critically memorable or worth repeat-
ing than the daring pronouncement that *Jor a long time past,
fictitious detectives and their achievements have more or less inter-
ested the readers of novels!'

As time went forward, published comment of a somewhat ana-
lytical nature about the detective story and its kin became more
frequent, though for a good many years scarcely more significant

There were exceptions. The chapter on ''The Literature of Crime
Detection'" in F. W, Chandler's The Literature of Roguery {Bos-
ton: Houghfon Mifflin, ^907) teas an early landmark, mature and
informed beyond its time, though of little present-day interest.
And G, K, Chesterton's essays beginning around the turn of the
century {one of which opens this volume) remain as fresh and im-
mediate today as when they were written. But on the whole it
must be said that the development of any competent body of de-
tective story criticism did not occur until the mid-i 920's — since
which date the anthologist in the field suffers only from an em-
barrassment of riches.

In this opening section, then, the reader will find ten chron-
ologically-arranged selections representing what, by some slight
imaginative license, may be called the Higher Criticism of the
subject. Six of the chosen ten are virtually obligatory: prefaces,
introductions, and chapters from the outstanding critical anthol-
ogies and full-length historical works devoted to police fiction in
its several aspects. The remaining four — and here the problem of
selection was infinitely more difficult — are random essays and
magazine articles chosen from several hundred possible candidates
to illustrate the nature and evolution of detective story criticism
through the years.

Ladies and gentlemen; the Higher Critics.

A Defence of Detective Stories

(1901)

By G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert K. Chesterton world-renowned English man-

ofdetterSj is justly beloved by devotees of police fiction as the
creator of Father Brown^ the little priest-detective who is one of
the true immortals of modern crime literature. But G,K,C, was also
one of the earliest and in his writings still remains one of the most
brilliant critical apologists for the detective story as a literary form.
The present essay, one of a number on the topic from his pen, is the
source of several of his most frequently quoted dicta on the subject.
It appeared in his The Defendant {London: R. B. Johnson, ipoi;
New York: Dodd, Mead, ip02) and marks what is probably the first
serious and perceptive application of the critical method to the
genre; certainly the earliest by any major literary figure.

jLfiJLOO_OOPPOQPQ<i9 00 00 0jQQ.OOOpOOOOOJ^OOOQJ)(iOOOQQi?Q,QQOOO_Oa

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the
popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of
many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace
prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because
they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does
not make a book popular. Bradshaw*s Railway Guide contains few
gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproari-
ously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more
exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are
more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular;
many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A
good detective story would probably be even more popular than a
bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not

G. K, Chesterton

realize that^there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to
them like speaking o£ a good devil. To write a story about a bur-
glary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it.
To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it
must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensa-
tional crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.

There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad de-
tective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is
between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a
perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real
advantages as an agent of the public weal.

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it
is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is ex-
pressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among
mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized
that they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of
our descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the
mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the
trees. Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and
obvious the detective story is certainly the Iliad.’ No one can have
failed to notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator
crosses London with something of the loneliness and liberty of a
prince in a tale of elfland, that in the course of that incalculable
journey the casual omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy
ship. The lights of the city begin to glow like innumerable goblin
eyes, since they are the guardians of some secret, however crude,
which the writer knows and the reader does not. Every twist of the
road is like a finger pointing to it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-
pots seems wildly and derisively signalling the meaning of the
mystery.

This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing, A
city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside,
for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of
conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen
may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the
street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate sym-
bol — message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or
a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist

A Defence of Detective Stories 5

of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in
his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as If it were a
graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational
a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtrac-
tion sums. Anything which tends, even under the fantastic form
of the minutise of Sherlock Holmes, to assert this romance of detail
in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably human character in
flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that the average man
should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at ten men in
the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh might
be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be pos-
sible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's
souls have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would
be harder and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt
their crimes. But since our great authors (with the admirable ex-
ception of Stevenson) decline to write of that thrilling mood and
moment when the eyes of the great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin
to flame in the dark, we must give fair credit to the popular litera-
ture which, amid a babble of pedantry and preciosity, declines to
regard the present as prosaic or the common as commonplace.
Popular art in all ages has been interested in contemporary man-
ners and costume; it dressed the groups around the Crucifixion in
the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers. In the last
century it was the custom for distinguished actors to present Mac-
beth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves in
this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and*
manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to im-
agine a picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in
tourist’s knickerbockers, or a performance of ‘Hamlet’ in which
the Prince appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his
hat. But this instinct of the age to look back, like Lot’s wife, could
not go on for ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic
possibilities of the modem city was bound to arise. It has arisen
in the popular detective stories, as rough and refreshing as the
ballads of Robin Hood.

There is, however, another good work that is done by detective
stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to
rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization,

G. jK. Chesterton

to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity
keeps in soifie sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself
is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of re-
bellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the
outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed
camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the
children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.
When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and some-
what fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves*
kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the
agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while
the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conserva-
tives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves.
The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of
man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and dar-
ing of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and un-
noticeable police management by which we are ruled and pro-
tected is only a successful knight-errantry.

The Art of the Detective Story

(1924)

By R, Austin Freeman

For many years most writing by partisans of the detective story
assumed an unconsciously defensive if not actually apologetic
tone. This state of affairs still largely persisted when the late re-
spected R, Austin Freeman [i862~-i^4^) first published the famous
essay which follows in Nineteenth-Century and After (London)
for May 1^24 — although the beginnings of a more positive and
assertive position will be discerned in his observations. As the
creator of Dr. Thorndyke and the acknowledged founder and
dean of modern scientific police fiction^ no one was better quali-
fied than Dr. Freeman to state the case on behalf of the ''pure''
or rigidly logical detective story , genus Britannicum. Some of the
more formalistic rules he advocates no longer hold today^ even
in England. Nevertheless, many a long-suffering reader will wish
that more present-day authors would study and take to heart Dr.
Freeman's still-valid statement of fundamentals.

iUUUUliUUULOjUUUU^

The status in the world of letters of that type of fiction which
finds its principal motive in the unravelment of crimes or similar •
intricate mysteries presents certain anomalies. By the critic and
the professedly literary person the detective story — to adopt the
unprepossessing name by which this class of fiction is now uni-
versally known — is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as out-
side the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work
produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for
consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons de-
void of culture and literary taste.

R. Austin Freeman

That such works are produced by such writers for such readers
is an undeniably truth; but in mere badness of quality the detec-
tive story holds no monopoly. By similar writers and for similar
readers there are produced love stories, romances, and even his-
torical tales of no better quality. But there is this difference: that,
whereas the place in literature of the love story or the romance
has been determined by the consideration of the masterpieces of
each type, the detective story appears to have been judged by its
failures. The status of the whole class has been fixed by an esti-
mate formed from inferior samples.

What is the explanation of this discrepancy? Why is it ttiat,
whereas a bad love story or romance is condemned merely on
its merits as a defective specimen of a respectable class, a detec-
tiv story is apt to be condemned without trial in virtue of some
sort of assumed original sin? The assumption as to the class of
reader is manifestly untrue. There is no type of fiction that is
more universally popular than the detective story. It is a familiar
fact that many famous men have found in this kind of reading
their favourite recreation, and that it is consumed with pleasure,
and even with enthusiasm, by many learned and intellectual
men, not infrequently in preference to any other form of fic-
tion.

This being the case, I again ask for an explanation of the con-
tempt in which the whole genus of detective fiction is held by
the professedly literary. Clearly, a form of literature which arouses
the enthusiasm of men of intellect and culture can be affected by
no inherently base quality. It cannot be foolish, and is unlikely
to be immoral. As a matter of fact, it is neither. The explanation
is probably to be found in the great proportion of failures; in the
tendency of the tyro and the amateur perversely to adopt this diffi-
cult and intricate form for their 'prentice efforts; in the crude
literary technique often associated with otherwise satisfactory pro-
ductions; and perhaps in the falling off in quality of the work of
regular novelists when they experiment in this department of
fiction, to which they may be adapted neither by temperament
nor by training.

Thus critical judgment has been formed, not on what the de-
tective story can be and should be, but on what it too frequently

The Art of the Detective Story 9

was in the past when crudely and incompetently done. Unfortu-
nately, this type of work is still prevalent; but it is mot representa-
tive. In late years there has arisen a new school of writers who,
taking the detective story seriously, have set a more exacting
standard, and whose work, admirable alike in construction and
execution, probably accounts for the recent growth in popularity
of this class of fiction. But, though representative, Aey are a
minority; and it is still true that a detective story which fully
develops the distinctive qualities proper to its genus, and is, in
addition, satisfactory in diction, in background treatment, in char-
acterization, and in general literary workmanship is probably the
rarest of all forms of fiction.

The rarity of good detective fiction is to be explained by a
fact which appears to be little recognized either by critics or by
authors; the fact, namely, that a completely executed detective
story is a very difficult and highly technical work, a work demand-
ing in its creator the union of qualities which, if not mutually
antagonistic, are at least seldom met with united in a single in-
dividual. On the one hand, it is a work of imagination, demanding
the creative, artistic faculty; on the other, it is a work of ratiocina-
tion, demanding the power of logical analysis and subtle and acute
reasoning; and, added to these inherent qualities, there must be a
somewhat extensive outfit of special knowledge. Evidence alike
of the difficulty of the work and the failure to realize it is fur-
nished by those occasional experiments of novelists of the ortho;
dox kind which have been referred to, experiments which com-
monly fail by reason of a complete misunderstanding of the na-
ture of the work and the qualities that it should possess.

A widely prevailing error is that a detective story needs to be
highly sensational. It tends to be confused with the mere crime
story, in which the incidents — tragic, horrible, even repulsive^ —
form the actual theme, and the quality aimed at is horror — crude
and pungent sensationalism. Here the writer's object is to make
the reader's flesh creep; and since that reader has probably, by a
course of similar reading, acquired a somewhat extreme degree of
obtuseness, the violence of the means has to be progressively in*
creased in proportion to the insensitiveness of the subject. The
sportsman in the juvenile verse sin^:

R. Austin Freeman

I shoot the hippopotamus with bullets made o£ platinum
Because if I use leaden ones his hide is sure to flatten 'em:

and that, in effect, is the position of the purveyor of gross sensa-
tionalism. His purpose is, at all costs, to penetrate his reader’s
mental epidermis, to the density of which he must needs adjust
the weight and velocity of his literary projectile.

Now no serious author will complain of the critic’s antipathy
to mere sensationalism. It is a quality that is attainable by the
least gifted writer and acceptable to the least critical reader; and,
unlike the higher qualities of literature, which beget in the reader
an increased receptiveness and more subtle appreciation, it creates,
as do drugs and stimulants, a tolerance which has to be met by
an increase of the dose. The entertainments of the cinema have
to be conducted on a scale of continually increasing sensational-
ism. The wonders that thrilled at first become commonplace, and
must be reinforced by marvels yet more astonishing. Incident
must be piled on incident, climax on climax, until any kind of
construction becomes impossible. So, too, in literature. In the
newspaper serial of the conventional type, each instalment of a
couple of thousand words, or less, must wind up with a thrilling
climax, blandly ignored at the opening of the next instalment;
while that ne plus ultra of wild sensationalism, the film novel, in
its extreme form is no more than a string of astonishing incidents,
unconnected by any intelligible scheme, each incident an inde-
pendent '‘thrill,” unexplained, unprepared for, devoid alike of
antecedents and consequences.

Some productions of the latter type are put forth in the guise
of detective stories, with which they apparently tend to be con-
fused by some critics. They are then characterized by the presenta-
tion of a crime — often in impossible circumstances which are
never accounted for — followed by a vast amount of rushing to
and fro of detectives or unofficial investigators in motor cars, aero-
planes, or motor boats, with a liberal display of revolvers or auto-
matic pistols and a succession of hair-raising adventures. If any
conclusion is reached, it is quite unconvincing, and the interest
of the story to its appropriate reader is in the incidental matter,
and not in the plot But the application of the term “detective
story” to works of this kind is misleading, for in the essential

The Art of the Detective Story

qualities of the type of fiction properly so designated they are
entirely deficient. Let us now consider what those qualities, are.

The distinctive quality of a detective story, in which it differs
from all other types of fiction, is that the satisfaction that it offers
to the reader is primarily an intellectual satisfaction. This is not
to say that it need be deficient in the other qualities appertaining
to good fiction: in grace of diction, in humour, in interesting
characterization, in picturesqueness of setting or in emotional
presentation. On the contrary, it should possess all these qualities.
It should be an interesting story, well and vivaciously told. But
whereas in other fiction these are the primary, paramount quali-
ties, in detective fiction they are secondary and subordinate to
the intellectual interest, to which they must be, if necessary, sacri-
ficed. The entertainment that the connoisseur looks for is an ex-
hibition of mental gymnastics in which he is invited to take part;
and the excellence of the entertainment must be judged by the
completeness with which it satisfies the expectations of the type
of reader to whom it is addressed.

Thus, assuming that good detective fiction must be good fic-
tion in general terms, we may dismiss those qualities which it
should possess in common with all other works of imagination
and give our attention to those qualities in which it differs from
them and which give to it its special character. I have said that
the satisfaction which it is designed to yield to the reader is pri-
marily intellectual, and we may now consider in somewhat more
detail the exact nature of the satisfaction demanded and the way
in which it can best be supplied. And first we may ask: What are
the characteristics of the representative reader? To what kind of
person is a carefully constructed detective story especially ad-
dressed?

We have seen that detective fiction has a wide popularity. The
general reader, however, is apt to be uncritical. He reads im-
partially the bad and the good, with no very clear perception of
the difference, at least in the technical construction. The real con-
noisseurs, who avowedly prefer this type of fiction to all others,
and who read it with close and critical attention, are to be found
among men of the definitely intellectual class: theologians, schol-
ars, lawyers, and to a less extent, perhaps, doctors and men of sci-

R, Austin Freeman

ence. Judging by the letters which I have received from time to
time, the enthusiast par excellence is the clergyman of a studious
and scholarly habit.

Now the theologian, the scholar and the lawyer have a common
characteristic: they are all men of a subtle type of mind. They
find a pleasure in intricate arguments, in dialectical contests, in
which the matter to be proved is usually of less consideration than
the method of proving it. The pleasure is yielded by the argu-
ment itself and tends to be proportionate to the intricacy of the
proof. The disputant enjoys the mental' exercise, just as a muscu-
lar man enjoys particular kinds of physical exertion. But the sat-
isfaction yielded by an argument is dependent upon a strict con-
formity with logical methods, upon freedom from fallacies of
reasoning, and especially upon freedom from any ambiguities as
to the data.

By schoolboys, street-corner debaters, and other persons who
are ignorant of the principles of discussion, debates are commonly
conducted by means of what we may call ^‘argument by assertion.”
Each disputant seeks to overwhelm his opponent by pelting him
with statements of alleged fact, each of which the other disputes,
and replies by discharging a volley of counterstatements, the truth
of which is promptly denied. Thus the argument collapses in a
chaos of conflicting assertions. The method of the skilled dialecti-
cian is exactly the opposite of this. He begins by making sure of
the matter in dispute and by establishing agreement with his ad-
versary on the fundamental data. Theological arguments are
usually based upon propositions admitted as true by both parties;
and the arguments of counsel are commonly concerned, not with
questions of fact, but with the consequences deducible from evi-
dence admitted equally by both sides.

Thus the intellectual satisfaction of an argument is conditional
on the complete establishment of the data. Disputes on questions
of fact are of little, if any, intellectual interest; but in any case
an argument — an orderly train of reasoning— cannot begin until
the data have been clearly set forth and agreed upon by both
parties. This very obvious truth is continually lost sight of by
authors. Plots, i.e., arguments, are frequently based upon alleged
‘"facts” — ^physical, chemical, and other — ^which the educated reader

The Art of the Detective Story 13

knows to be untrue, and of which the untruth totally invalidates
conclusions drawn from them and thus destroys jthe intellectual
interest of the argument.

The other indispensable factor is freedom from fallacies of rea-
soning. The conclusion must emerge truly and inevitably from
the premises; it must be the only possible conclusion, and must
leave the competent reader in no doubt as to its unimpeachable
truth.

It is here that detective stories most commonly fail. They tend
to be pervaded by logical fallacies, and especially by the fallacy
of the undistributed middle term. The conclusion reached by the
gifted investigator, and offered by him as inevitable, is seen by
the reader to be merely one of a number of possible alternatives.
The effect when the author’s '‘must have been” has to be cor-
rected by the reader into “might have been” is one of anti-climax.
The promised and anticipated demonstration peters out into a
mere suggestion; the argument is left in the air and the reader
is balked of the intellectual satisfaction which he was seeking.

Having glanced at the nature of the satisfaction sought by the
reader, we may now examine the structure of a detective story and
observe the means employed to furnish that satisfaction. On the
general fictional qualities of such a story we need not enlarge ex-
cepting to contest the prevalent belief that detective fiction possesses
no such qualities. Apart from a sustained love interest — for which
there is usually no room — a detective novel need not, and should
not, be inferior in narrative interest or literary workmanship to
any other work of fiction. Interests which conflict with the main
theme and hinder its clear exposition are evidently inadmissible;
but humour, picturesque setting, vivid characterization and even
emotional episodes are not only desirable on aesthetic grounds, ,
but, if skilfully used, may be employed to distract the reader’s
attention at critical moments in place of the nonsensical “false
clues” and other exasperating devices by which writers too often
seek to confuse the issues. The Mystery of Edwin Drood shows us
the superb fictional quality that is possible in a detective story
from the hand of a master.

Turning now to the technical side, we note that the plot of
a detective novel is, in effect, an argument conducted under the

R, Austin Freeman

guise of fiction. But it is a peculiar form of argument. The prob-
lem having 6ee,n stated, the data for its solution are presented in-
conspicuously and in a sequence purposely dislocated so as to
conceal their connexion; and the reader’s task is to collect the
data, to rearrange them in their correct logical sequence and as-
certain their relations, when the solution of the problem should
at once become obvious. The construction thus tends to fall into
four stages: (i) statement of the problem; (2) production of the
data for its solution (‘"clues”); (3) the discovery, i.e., completion
of the inquiry by the investigator and declaration by him of the
solution; (4) proof of the solution by an exposition of the evi-
dence.

1. The problem is usually concerned with a crime, not because
a crime is an attractive subject, but because it forms the most
natural occasion for an investigation of the kind required. For
the same reason — suitability — crime against the person is more
commonly adopted than crime against property; and murder —
actual, attempted or suspected — is usually the most suitable of all.
For the villain is the player on the other side; and since we want
him to be a desperate player, the stakes must be appropriately
high. A capital crime gives us an adversary who is playing for his
life, and who consequently furnishes the best subject for dramatic
treatment.

2. The body of the work should be occupied with the telling
of the story, in the course of which the data, or ‘"clues,” should be
produced as inconspicuously as possible, but clearly and without
ambiguity in regard to their essentials. The author should be
scrupulously fair in his conduct of the game. Each card as it is
played should be set down squarely, face upwards, in full view

. of the reader. Under no circumstances should there be any decep-
tion as to the facts. The reader should be quite clear as to what
he may expect as true. In stories of the older type, the middle
action is filled out with a succession of false clues and with the
fixing of suspicion first on one character, then on another, and
again on a third, and so on. The clues are patiently followed, one
after another, and found to lead nowhere. There is feverish activ-
ity, but no result. All this is wearisome to the reader and is, in my
opinion, bad technique. My practice is to avoid false clues en-

The Art of the Detective Story 15

tirely and to depend on keeping the reader occupied with the
narrative. If the ice should become uncomfortably thin, a dra-
matic episode will distract the reader’s attention and carry him
safely over the perilous spot. Devices to confuse and mislead the
reader are bad practice. They dead'^^n the interest, and they are
quite unnecessary; the reader can always be trusted to mislead
himself, no matter how plainly the data are given. Some years
ago I devised, as an experiment, an inverted detective story in
two parts.* The first part was a minute and detailed description
of a crime, setting forth the antecedents, motives, and all attend-
ant circumstances. The reader had seen the crime committed,
knew all about the criminal, and was in possession of all the facts.
It would have seemed that there was nothing left to tell. But I
calculated that the reader would be so occupied with the crime
that he would overlook the evidence. And so it "urned out. The
second part, which described the investigation of the crime, had
to most readers the effect of new matter. All the facts were known;
but their evidential quality had not been recognized.

This failure of the reader to perceive the evidential value of
facts is the foundation on which detective fiction is built. It may
generally be taken that the author may exhibit his facts fearlessly
provided only that he exhibits them separately and unconnected.
And the more boldly he displays the data, the greater will be the
intellectual interest of the story. For the tacit understanding of
the author with the reader is that the problem is susceptible of
solution by the latter by reasoning from the facts given; and such
solution should be actually possible. Then the data should be pro-
duced as early in the story as is practicable. The reader should
have a body of evidence to consider while the tale is telling. The
production of a leading fact near the end of the book is unfair
to the reader, while the introduction, of capital evidence — ^such
as that of an eye-witness — ^at the extreme end is radically bad tech-
nique, amounting to a breach of the implied covenant with the
reader.

3. The “discovery,” i.e., the announcement by the investigator
of the conclusion reached by him, brings the inquiry formally to
an end. It is totally inadmissible thereafter to introduce any new

♦ The Cuse 0 / Oscar BmdskL

i6 R- Austin Freeman

matter. The reader is given to understand that he now has before
him. the evidence and the conclusion, and that the latter is con-
tained in the former. If it is not, the construction has failed, and
the reader has been cheated. The “discovery’' will usually come
as a surprise to the reader and will thus form the dramatic climax
of the story, but it is to be noted that the dramatic quality of the
climax is strictly dependent on the intellectual conviction which
accompanies it. This is frequently overlooked, especially by gen-
eral novelists who experiment in detective fiction. In their eager-
ness to surprise the reader, they forget that he has also to be con-
vinced. A literary friend of mine, commenting on a particularly
conclusive detective story, declared that “the rigid demonstration
destroyed the artistic effect.” But the rigid demonstration was
the artistic effect. The entire dramatic effect of the climax of
a detective story is due to the sudden recognition by the reader
of the significance of a number of hitherto uncomprehended facts;
or if such recognition should not immediately occur, the effect
of the climax becomes suspended until it is completed in the final
stage.

4. Proof of the solution. This is peculiar to “detective” con-
struction. In all ordinai7 novels, the climax, or denouement, fin-
ishes the story, and any continuation is anti-climax. But a detec-
tive story has a dual character. There is the story, with its dra-
matic interest, and enclosed in it, so to speak, is the logical prob-
lem; and the climax of the former may leave the latter apparently
unsolved. It is then the duty of the author, through the medium
of the investigator, to prove the solution by an analysis and ex-
position of the evidence. He has to demonstrate to the reader that
the conclusion emerged naturally and reasonably from the facts
known to him, and that no other conclusion was possible.

If it is satisfactorily done, thi^ is to the critical reader usually
the most interesting part of the book; and it is the part by which
jxQ — ^very properly— judges the quality of the whole work. Too
often it yields nothing but disappointment and a sense of anti-
climax. The author is unable to solve his own problem. Acting
on the pernicious advice of the pilot in the old song to “Fear
not, but trust in Providence,” he has piled up his mysteries in the
hope of being able to find a plausible explanation; and now, when

The Art of the Detective Story 17

he comes to settle his account with the reader, his logical assets
are nil. What claims to be a demonstration turns out to be a njere
specious attempt to persuade the reader that the inexplicable has
been explained; that the fortunate guesses of an inspired investi-
gator are examples of genuine reasoning. A typical instance of this
kind of anti-climax occurs in Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
when Dupin follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion and
joins in at the appropriate moment. The reader is astonished and
marvels how such an apparently impossible feat could have been
performed. Then Dupin explains; but his explanation is totally
unconvincing, and the impossibility remains. The reader has had
his astonishment for nothing. It cannot be too much emphasized
that to the critical reader the quality in a detective story which
takes precedence of all others is conclusiveness. It is the quality
which, above all others, yields that intellectual satisfaction that
the reader seeks; and it is. the quality which is the most difficult
to attain, and which costs more than any other in care and labour
to the author.

Grime and Detection

(1926)

By E. M. Wrong

oinnrT^nnnroTroinnnnrsinr^irinrsirsxsinnn^^

With the publication of a collection of short stories called Crime
and Detection (London & New York: Oxford University Press^
ip2S), detective story criticism finally left off apologizing and took
the offensive. Not only was this anthology the first on the subject
to be compiled in accordance with critical principles; its succinct
Introduction, here reproduced, by E. M. Wrong (iSSp-ipaS)
marked the earliest attempt mt a purposive historical and analytic
cal survey and summation of the medium. Together with the es-
says by Willard Huntington Wright and Dorothy Sayers which
follow, it constituted for several years substantially all the scholar-
ship on the subject that was to be found between covers. Unlike
his two confreres, who were themselves detective story writers,
of the first rank, Mr. Wrong was a layman. The son of the Cana-
dian scholar G. M. Wrong, he was by profession an historian, a
Fellow and Tutor of Magdalen College, Oxford; he died at the
untimely age of thirty-nine. So far as is known, the present essay
was his sole contribution, critical or creative, to the literature of
detection. If there are often wide gaps in the discussion, if the
consideration of the subject seems almost exclusively British, it
must be remembered that Mr. Wrong was primarily introducing
a collection of stories chosen for English readers, and that when
he made his study the Golden Age of the American detective story
was only just beginning.

JLSUULSUL2JiSUUlStJiXSUiSiSiSLSJiSiSi^^

The detective story is of respectable antiquity if we judge it by
its remote forebears, though it is recent times only that have made

Crime and Detection

it into a branch of art. Two early examples lie in the Apocrypha:
in one, DanieFs cross-examination saves Susanna from the false
witness of lecherous elders; in the other, the same Daniel estab-
lishes the deceitfulness of Bel’s priests. The modern reader, accus-
tomed to subtlety of plot and tangled clues, finds these tales ele-
mentary, for the crimes that they record are so obvious that Daniel
unravels them by the simplest of methods. Yet, as the pace of the
detective story must always be set by the criminal and not by the
detective, and since Daniel did solve both cases submitted to him,
we are probably justified in regarding him as the remote ancestor
of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Thorndyke.

A story of crime and of unusual methods to discover the cul-
prit can be found in Herodotus. An enterprising Egyptian with
his brother robbed the royal treasury by a secret entrance; the
brother was laid by the heel in a trap, whereon the hero cut off
his head to prevent identification. A few days later he fuddled the
guardians of the body with drink, stole and buried the corpse.
He ended by escaping from the king’s daughter turned prostitute
to extort a confession; he was pardoned and married the princess,
having proved himself a bolder and more successful, though pos-
sibly a cruder, Raffles than any of recent times. Here are the twin
themes of detection and crime sketched in their essentials. Why
was there no flowering under the Roman Empire, when an urban
population sought amusement in the butchery of the circus, and
might have been more cheaply appeased by stories of law-breaking
and discovery? Perhaps a faulty law of evidence was to blame, for
detectives cannot flourish until the public has an idea of what
constitutes proof, and while a common criminal procedure is ar-
rest, torture, confession, and death.

Whatever the cause, the art of detective fiction lay for centuries
untouched, and its effective history is crowded into the last eighty
years. Defoe would have made an admirable detective writer had
he been drawn to the subject, for his love of piling detail on de-
tail would have concealed all relevant clues from the ordinary
reader while leaving them in plain view the whole time. Balzac
flirted effectively with crime in Vautrin, but his criminal was
much abler than his police. Our ancestors indeed took a great
interest in homicide. The stir made by Eugene Aram, by Burke

E. M. Wrong

and Hare, shows that, as does De Quincey’s famous essay on mur-
der. But if was sensation rather than reasoning that they sought,
and crude sensation is better provided by real crimes than by im-
aginary. So the detective story was left for modern times to de-
velop into an art with a technique and a code of its own.

There are still some, though fewer than a few years ago, who
deny that it is or can become an art. They stand in their conten-
tion partly on the illiteracy and bad logic of many detective
stories, partly on the nature of the theme. But artistic achieve-
ment must be judged by the best, not by the average, or else the
popularity of any form that attracts incompetent practitioners
would lower its place. Robert Montgomery injured not poetry but
himself. As to the theme, the detective story is obviously not con-
cerned with any very exalted actions, but The Ring and the Book
finds its subject in the Old Bailey of Rome, and Agamemnon’s
quarrel with Achilles did not spring from lofty motives. Some
criticize detective fiction because it is not realistic, gives inade-
quate scope for character drawing, looks chiefly to one thing only,
and that mechanism. That is its nature, but there can be an art
of plot as well as an art of the mimicry of life; art is not limited
to realism but can show itself in diverse forms.

Detective fiction as we know it begins with Poe. When one
studies the slightness, the lack of effort, in the three stories that
Poe wrote between 1841 and 1845 and then turns to the multiply-
ing progeny of his invention, the effect is impressive indeed. Poe
set for all time one of the two lines on which the detective story
has grown — a private investigator chronicled by an unimagina-
tive friend; he did this in three stories only, and then he either
wearied of the game or his audience was unresponsive, and he
turned from the rich pocket of gold into which he had dipped
his hand to other and more barren fields. He had begun one of
the two orthodox traditions of to-day, but it was not developed
and made popular for over forty years — ^not in fact till 1887, when
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet,

It was the other and less rigorous form that flourished till Sher-
lock Holmes was to revive the Dupin canon, and its leading Eng-
lish follower was Wilkie Collins. In i860 The Woman in White
made a happy connexion between villainy and detection; in 1868

Crime and Detection

came The Moonstone, more orthodox because more of a pure puz-
zle. The criminal theme attracted Dickens, worn-out though he
was with popular lecturing, and in the autumn of 1869 he began
what some regard as potentially his greatest novel. The first num-
ber of Edwin Drood appeared in April 1870; two months later
Dickens was dead, and his mystery had not got as far as the dis-
covery of the corpse. There are some who even deny that there is
a corpse to be discovered, and speculation rages still over the
identity of Datchery. Whatever the secret, every lover of detec-
tive fiction would sooner have the unwritten chapters than all
the lost books of Livy.

Meanwhile a considerable development went on in France.
Gaboriau wrote his police tales between 1866 and 1873, Fortune
du Boisgobey took up the theme between 1872 and 1889. Stories
of crime became common in England and America largely, it
appears, through the influence of Collins and Gaboriau. That
they were popular in the ’eighties, even before Sherlock Holmes,
Anna Katharine Green s stories show, and if further proof is
wanted it can be found in Stevenson’s unsurpassed romance, The
Wrong Box. We read there that Gideon Forsyth had written a
detective tale called Who Put Back the Clock?, and that only three
copies of it had passed into circulation — if the British Museum
can be called circulation when the work is secreted behind a false
catalogue entry. Now Forsyth’s way of disposing of a troublesome
grand piano does not stamp him as a man of great penetration of
mind, and we know moreover that his attempt at musical com-
position was an echo of “Tommy, Make Room For Your Uncle”;
he had in fact no originality. He would assuredly not have tried
the detective form of composition had it not been popular. The
Wrong Box appeared in 1889, Forsyth’s literary adventure
must have been at least a year or two earlier, perhaps in 1887,
the great year when Sherlock Holmes broke upon the world.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s name must stand, in the history of the
detective story, only a little lower than Poe’s. He wedded plots
nearly as elaborate as Gaboriau’s to the methods and tradition of
Poe; from the marriage was produced Sherlock Holmes, to be-
come in a few years a universally recognized character of English
speech. Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, but we have forgotten

22 E. M. Wrong

them, and tend to think of the pre-Holmes detectives as of the
pre-Shakespearian drama; to call them precursors only. Holmes
was a really great achievement. From him dates the expansion
of the last thirty years, and the crystallizing of one type of detec-
tive story. The canon is not exclusive but it is fixed; a friend of
the detective tells the tale, as he did in Poe; he sees or can see
all that the detective does, but never understands what deduc-
tions to draw from the facts. Thus the chief relevant incidents are
in reality concealed from the reader though there is an ostenta-
tious parade of openness. The detective's friend acts in the dual
capacity of very average reader and of Greek chorus; he comments
freely on what he does not understand.

For a time it seemed that this might become the only accepted
form of detective fiction. Mr. Morrison followed it in Martin
Hewitt, softening the detective's eccentricities, making him more
of a business man, and giving him a less striking coadjutor than
Dr. Watson. Dr. Austin Freeman took the same line with Thorn-
dyke, improving on Sherlock’s science, raising the narrator to av-
erage intelligence, and providing mysteries more cunning and
obscure. Miss Christie’s Poirot follows the tradition, though he
distrusts the laboratory and relies on “the little grey cells" of his
brain; he is assisted by the most admirably foolish of all Watsons,
Captain Hastings. But some writers have revolted against the
domination of a Boswell-Watson, and have preferred to tell their
stories in the third person. A school has arisen modelled more
on the Collins-Gaboriau tradition than on that of Dupin-Holmes,
and the technique of the art has of late widened considerably.

This second school divides itself unequally into two parts. Most
of its adherents concern themselves with external clues; industry
and mobility take the place of the instantaneous deduction loved
of Holmes; Mr. Mason’s Hanaud is a fine example of this kind,
though he is like Holmes in one way — ^while his’ actions are not
described by his admirer, only such actions are recorded as his
admirer has seen. Better examples of the new mode are the pains-
taking sleuths of Mr. Crofts, who by careful inquiry and a lavish
use of transport facilities explode the most detailed alibis known
to fiction — alibis moreover that might easily go unquestioned in
court. Mr. Bentley's Trent worked chiefly on similar lines, al-

Crime and Detection

though he refrained from arresting the suspect because his judge-
ment o£ character made him come to doubt the evidence o£ his
eyes.

A less common and rather more subtle type is that of the in-
tuitionist detective. England knows only two of these worth men-
tion, Mr. Chesterton’s Father Brown and Mr. Bailey’s Mr. For-
tune. Father Brown needs no lengthy method of proving guilt
for he can guess the secret of the crime from his wide knowledge
of sin. Mr. Fortune feels atmosphere more keenly than any other
detective, and is marvellously accurate in his judgement of char-
acter. These men leap to conclusions while others limp behind.
Those who like them like them very much indeed, even though
they admit that many of the crimes discovered by Father Brown
were impossible, and think Mr. Fortune perhaps too ready to as-
sume the responsibility of granting life or death. They are at any
rate the most brilliant talkers among modern detectives, not only
in what they say but also in their pregnant silences.

Some other detectives share their intuitional ability, though
none possess it in as high degree as these two. Miss Christie’s
Poirot, Mr. Mason’s Hanaud, are at times helped by it; so is Mr.
Bramah’s Max Carrados, who combines in one person all the
remarkable abilities of all the blind men of history. Mr. Milne’s
Antony Gillingham has a visual memory that brings almost the
same result as intuition. Yet all these last depend mainly on ex-
ternal things, and are detectives of exploration rather than of
instinct.

Forsyth found, Stevenson tells us, that *‘it is the difficulty of the
police romance that the reader is always a person of such vastly
greater ingenuity than the writer.” This remains the cardinal
problem, but it has been fairly met and defeated many times.
Technique has improved so that things once permissible can be
no longer allowed, and there is now a kind of code of what is fair
play to the reader. Yet even so the old problem is still too often
evaded. Clues are given that are meant only to mislead, and whose
existence is never explained. Criminal and victim, one or both,
will behave as no sane person would; corpses turn out to be alive,
and secret passages provide a surfeit of alibis. Father Knox’s The
Viaduct Murder was difficult to solve largely through improbable

24 Wrong

false clues, concealed passages, and inept action by the murderer
which made his actions unlike those of the ordinary sensible man;
eventually he was hanged through his own stupidity. That hap-
pens, it is true, often enough in real life, but art should be better
than actuality.

The detective story has now joined the novel of realism and
the tale of passion as fit and proper reading for evenings and holi-
days, and its most devoted adherents are found principally among
the highly educated. Partly this is because the modern age prides
itself on its ingenuity. It enjoys mechanism and is attracted by the
neatness of a good mystery. Economy, tidiness, completeness —
these are qualities possessed by every good tale of detection, and
they are qualities conspicuously lacking in some forms now much
cried up, especially in Russian novels and English vers libre. Re-
acting against works of art with little beginning and no end but
only a yawning middle, and in some measure rebelling against
the discrepancies so common in real life, we go for solace to the
detective of fiction. His appeal is chiefly intellectual, but there
must be some emotion in it too, or else our sympathy might lie
as much with the hunted as with the avenger of society. Yet the
heart must be less moved than the brain or our pleasure will be
the less.

A detective story involves a problem which must nearly always
be criminal, the guilty man must be discovered by the detective
and brought to justice unless his breach of the law was technical
rather than moral. Commonly the matter is not taken beyond ar-
rest, and this for various reasons. Sometimes the chain of evi-
dence that satisfies a reader would fail to convince a jury, or might
not even stand the rules of cross-examination; when this seems
likely the criminal sometimes commits suicide once his capture
is certain. Even when this objection to a trial does not exist an
author seldom brings his culprit into court. The atmosphere of a
trial would not accord well with the feelings roused by the chase,
and the sight of a remorseless system grinding to pieces the man
who has, after all, provided half our entertainment, might swing
our sympathy to his side. Even arrest is dispensed with at times;
a confession is enough for Father Brown, who is concerned more
with laying bare the heart of man than with the crude matter of

Crime and Detection

punishment. In fact the detective is not often a sociologist, and
tends to shun the drab side of crime, its atonement. The number
of criminals in fiction who come to their end by accident or sui-
cide is very great, and points to some laxity by the detective after
he has made his arrest.

Of the crimes to be detected murder must always come first,
for it is more mysterious and dramatic than any other. Yet one
cannot hold that every detective story must centre round homi-
cide, for that would rule out many of our best stories. In the
early days of detective fiction murders and attempted murders
were much rarer than they are to-day. Only one of Poe’s three
tales was about murder, and the killers of Marie Roget remained
in fact undiscovered. Sherlock Holmes and Martin Hewitt were
more often consulted about small crimes than are the chief mod-
ern practitioners. Time has in fact exalted murder, which used
to be only one of several offences, to a position of natural su-
premacy.

* There are good reasons for this. What we want in our detec-
tive fiction is not a semblance of real life, where murder is in-
frequent and petty larceny common, but deep mystery and con-
flicting clues. Murder has removed one party to the secret, and
so is essentially more mysterious than theft. Moreover, it involves
an intenser motive than any other peace-time activity: the drama
is keyed high from the start for the murderer is playing for the
highest stake he has, and can reasonably be expected to tangle the
evidence even to the committing of a second murder. The law
places murder in a category by itself, not necessarily because it
is more wicked than other crimes — the murder of a blackmailer
appeals to us, at least in fiction, as a beneficent act — ^but because
it is more desperate and final. When the death of a man is com-
passed either the victim or the slayer is generally a villain, and
either the motives or incidents of the deed, save when it is due
to animal passion or to drink, are nearly always interesting. The
motive for robbery, covetousness, is almost too common; most of
us know it well. Hatred that is strong enough to bring murder
is familiar enough to be intelligible to nearly every one, yet far
enough from our normal experience to let us watch as detached
observers, for we do not feel that it is our own crimes that are

26 Ev M. Wrong

unmasked. So for many reasons murder is advisable, though not
necessary. The author, if he withholds its appeal, must give us
compensation in some other way. This is admirably done in Mr.
Croft’s The Ponson Case^ where three excellent alibis make acci-
dental death more than tolerable.

One temptation the detective novelist does well to avoid; many
have walked into it and few have escaped with their artistry un-
blemished. It is that of including in the same book a Napoleon
of crime and a Wellington of detection, drawing a master-villain
who controls a huge organization of iniquity and impartially di-
rects robbery, forgery, blackmail, and murder. It is an attractive
theme, for it provides an explanation of the most improbable
crimes, since anything may be part of a campaign against civiliza-
tion. Yet it does not do, for all that. A small objection is that a
man with the intellectual resources of the master-criminal would
naturally take to politics or business rather than to crime. A
greater one is that we never have the organization or the motives
of the captain of evil exposed to us; we see him only in sporadic
operation and near his fall, his true greatness we have to take on
faith. Greatest of all is the fact that were the enemy the intel-
lectual prodigy he is painted, he would begin operations by snuff-
ing out the detective before the detective knew of his existence.
Moriarty could have had Holmes murdered a number of times
if he had not stayed his hand until Holmes’s plans were nearly
complete. In fact one suspects Holmes, whose reasoning was not
always perfect, of exaggerating both the power and brains of the
Professor of Mathematics. And lastly, the detective who fights a
universal provider of crime has to make more use than is quite
proper of the official police. The final struggle is one of organiza-
tion against organization; it is never really described for us,
and we get instead violent but often clumsy attempts to kill
the detective when the time for that is over, and the crim-
inal’s real danger has shifted from Baker Street to Scotland
Yard.

Criticism of the Moriarty theme does not mean that the crimi-
nal must play a lone hand and be passive once his work is ac-
complished. He may have a gang, provided it does not grow into
a departmental store, and he may attempt the life of the detective.

Crime and Detection

A counter-attack makes the problem dynamic rather than static,
and gives life to the story. The greatest master of tales where the
criminal fights to the end is Dr. Austin Freeman: in A Silent
Witness he achieved a unique success, an unsuspected man fear-
ing that his identity was known made detection possible by his
needless struggle. Such a war is better than a tame pursuit.

Tales of giant conspiracy against civilization share many of the
defects of the master-criminal theme. Like it they have a pleasant
side — they make the detective run for his life. We may get a little
tired of the security of our detectives who take the money while
the criminal runs the risk. So we are glad to see him fleeing either
because his particular Moriarty is after him or because he has
trespassed on some vast design against the state or society in gen-
eral. A good chase described by the fugitive, though it falls a little
outside the ordinary scope of detective fiction, is in some ways
better than the plain narrative of pursuit, and Mr. Buchan's The
Thirty-Nine Steps and The Power House contain such hunts in
classic perfection. Possibly it is unfair to complain that the revela-
tion of such mysteries when it comes is never quite up to the
chase. The spy story has been well developed on the lines of pur-
suit of the pursuer before and during the war; when peace made
the Teuton innocuous, author and reader turned for similar en-
joyment to Russian communist agents. They have on the whole
brought a poor return. We knew what the spy wanted, he had an
intelligible purpose; but these new conspirators, supposedly sub-
tle and dangerous, never quite convince. What do they hope for?
Their organization is generally far too large for their secret, which
in itself never is convincing. In an attempt to explain conduct
that is sometimes foolish, always unusual, the author may tell us
that these villains work from a pure passion for “evil," it is for
this that they abduct, assassinate, and rob. But this “evil" re-
mains inexplicable, and we can only guess its power from the
dark deeds of its apostles. So intellect though reluctant will creep
in and complain that the mystery does not explain the action. It
is, one may remark, time for a pause in subtle Bolshevik plots;
the other side should have a chance, and there is room for a
tale of the unmasking of a dastardly capitalist intrigue by some
bright spark in the labour movement. Mr. Wells in When the

28 £. M. Wrong

Sleeper Awakes approaches such a theme, and Mr. Baines in The
Blavk Circle comes very near it.

From the habits of the great detectives of fiction it is possible
to draw some general rules, provided they are not made too dog-
matic to cramp genius. The relations of an investigator to the
police have varied a good deal since Poe. Dupin and Holmes were
private citizens with an extreme contempt for their salaried rivals.
Dupin retired or died soon after his failure to solve the Marie
Roget problem; Holmes continued in occasional practice till 1914,
and gradually established a more friendly relationship with Scot-
land Yard. The greatest detective now in business, Thorndyke,
works freely with the police, and has always been willing to use
them as his instruments. Mr. Bailey’s Fortune has gone further
and become himself an official, though it is not easy to define
his exact position; he has a freer hand than most civil servants
enjoy. Mr. Mason’s Hanaud goes further still and has never en-
gaged in genuine private practice. The tendency is clear, it is
towards greater laxity and away from a rigid convention. Yet the
detective should be careful, lest he become swallowed up in the
government machine and lose the freedom to take a case when
and as he will.

When the tale follows the Poe canon and the story is told by
the detective’s Boswell, certain obvious advantages follow. The
narrative of an eye-witness attains a dramatic quality more easily
than does an impersonal record. The clues can, as we have seen,
be described not as they really are, but as they appear to a man
of average, or generally less than average, intelligence. This pa-
rade of openness pleases while it deceives. Yet if there is a Boswell
he must be present at all times, and this may prove inconvenient.
The intuitionist detective like Father Brown or Mr. Fortune
would only be hampered by him. It is true that they often need
companions, partly as foil, partly to share in the conversation.
But they get assistance as it is required. Fortune from the police.
Father Brown from Flambeau, who was a prosperous thief till he
reformed and became an unsuccessful detective. Mr. Bramah’s
Max Carrados generally operates with a private investigator called
Carlyle, who is competent in a normal divorce case but quite at
sea against subtlety.

Crime and Detection

The habit of running in couples, generally very ill-matched
couples, at first sight appears strange. Why should a client seek
out Holmes in some very private affair, and never object to Wat-
son's presence at the most intimate revelations — ^guessing (as he
must) that Watson's help will be negligible? But man in general
likes telling his secrets to an interested audience, and there is
more diflSculty in checking confidences than in extorting them.
Moreover, a great detective’s help can only be obtained on his
terms, and if he insists on companionship he must have it.

Dupin began the practice of instantaneous deduction; Holmes
continued it, became over-confident, and was rather lucky that his
occasional non sequiturs avoided exposure. A criminal who had
grasped his methods could have defeated him. Holmes knew
which way a bicycle had gone because the back wheel’s impres-
sion was deeper than that of the front wheel; the fact is true
but, save possibly on a hill, contributes nothing to the question
of direction. Holmes guessed that two persons, not three, had
drunk out of three glasses because all the lees were in the third,
but two clever men could have drunk from all three and avoided
this, or three might thus have masqueraded as two. Many have
discerned a weakening in Holmes’s powers as he grew older, and
attributed this to a fall over a cliff at the hands of Moriarty. But
in fact he never had such a fall, and if he deteriorated it was
probably through his long addiction to cocaine.

What one loves in Holmes, in truth, is not his logic but his
habits and his colleague. No detective has been so successfully
eccentric as he was. None has had as satisfactory a companion as
Watson, who is not quite the fool he is often thought. Once, as
Mr. Vernon Rendall points out,* Watson deceived Holmes and
induced him at St, Luke’s College to detect an imaginary bit of *
cribbing for a scholarship examination. Watson is in fact a re-
markable person, and his stories, like Boswell’s Johnson^ are the
records of not one but two great men. His brain remains con-
sistently a trifle below the average; his restraint, devotion, and
character are constantly above it, and his medical practice is oblig-
ing if not lucrative.

Holmes dabbled in science, but his knowledge therein bears the

• Vernon Rendall, The London Nights of Bekize, 191^, pp. 147-57.

go E. M. Wrong

same relation to Thorndyke's as his pocket magnifying-glass to
the latter’s res.earch case. In Thorndyke we have complete use of
all the resources of the laboratory, coupled with a logic that is
safer than that of Holmes because it is less cock-sure. The chief
blemish in Thorndyke is the deplorable habit his associates pos-
sess of falling in love in the course of an investigation. The record
of detection should in general be as cold as a scientific experi-
ment, and to mix romance with it is in some measure to spoil it.
A detective ought to remain single or at least not obtrude his own
family affairs on us, and the same applies to the victim, the crim-
inal, and the associate, save only when a love affair forms an in-
tegral part of the mystery. For in a detective story the true beauty
is in mass and line, not in irrelevant ornament without struc-
tural value: that should be left for the realists to exploit.

Few other detectives need specific mention, but it may be worth
pointing out that Miss Christie’s Poirot has twice been mistaken
on a point of English law. He thinks that arrest for a crime re-
lieves a man who is discharged of all further risk, and he may
find his tasks easier in future if he learns that only trial and ac-
quittal have this result.

One last problem remains: should a detective tell all, lay bare
his clues as they are found, with all their significance, or may he
keep them secret till the revelation scene when all is made clear?
Real life could give but one answer; the detective would have
to explain the position from day to day, else with his death from
murder or accident the fears of the criminal would perish. But
in fiction it is another matter, and almost the only detectives who
take us fully into their confidence are those of Mr. Crofts. Holmes
was extremely secretive; Thorndyke makes a parade of openness
but keeps his special knowledge, on which the meaning of his
clues depends, to himself; Hanaud not only conceals all that he
can, but even starts every quest with some special information
not known to the reader. Father Brown may only see what his
companions see, but it is by no means described as he sees it.
Lord Gorell’s Humble thorne and Evelyn Temple * let us know
what they know as they learn it, and so to some extent does Mr.
Bentley’s Trent, but all these investigators were proved wrong, so

In the Night.

Crime and Detection

their honesty was a subtle kind of deception. If the rules of art
are made by the artists, a detective is entitled to secrecy provided
it is not too flagrant.

The detective story has proved capable of high development
and has become a definite art; the same cannot be said of the
tale of crime with the criminal as hero. Why is there this differ-
ence? Why is Holmes a greater figure than the late Raffles?

There are several reasons. A detective thrives on difficulties,
cannot be great without them, but does not make his own. A
criminal is in a different position. The better criminal he is, the
more thoroughly he plans his campaign, every chance is allowed
for, ail goes smoothly, and as a result there should be no story.
An account of his greatest successes would be as even and un-
dramatic as the life of a stockbroker. Therefore many crime stories
have by the nature of things to deal with episodes that should
never have occurred were the criminal a true superman; the au-
thor may cry ‘Here is a great though misguided intellect,’ but
our reason stirs uneasily. Then there is the question of morality.
Perhaps art in general should have no moral purpose, but the
art of the detective story has one and must have; it seeks to justify
the law and to bring retribution on the guilty. The criminal must
be unmasked, the detective represents good and must triumph.
To make a hero of the criminal is to reverse the moral law, which
is after all based on common sense, for crime is not in fact gen-
erous and open but mean. Robin Hood may have robbed the
rich and given to the poor, but his accounts were never audited,
and the proportion of his charity to his thefts remains obscure.
Raffles stole principally from unpleasant people, but steal he did;
not even success can make robbery appeal to us as a truly noble
career. Is the criminal then to try other crimes than theft? Black-
mail hardly provides a fitting career for a hero, and we are driven
back on murder. Now it is possible for murderers to show cour-
age and resource, to be less mean than the pickpocket or forger.
But murder to be successful must be selfish, the victim cannot
be given a chance, so a narrative of successful murders, like a
narrative of successful robbery, leaves us at the end with a bad
taste in our mouth. If each murder is to be done from the high-
est motives (as those by Mr. Wallace’s Four Just Men) it will not

32 E, M. Wrong

be easy for there to be enough of them to keep our interest and
apppval. Even the Four Just Men began public life by killing a
fairly harmless Secretary of State to prevent the Cabinet, of which
he was but one member, from carrying a bill through Parliament,
We might wink at this if we disapproved of the bill, but can it
be called justice? Was this the only way? After all, if we are to
regard murder as just, we must credit the murderer with an om-
niscience that we deny to our courts of law. Even if he thinks him-
self omniscient has he any business to act on his own opinion,
regardless of the consequences to the innocent?

It is probably for some such reasons that the crime story has
on the whole been a failure as compared with the tale of detec-
tion. Even Raffles, supposed to be a Bayard of crime, did many
mean things, and caused great unhappiness to innocent police-
men and amiable wives. If we analyse him we find that he took
to crime because he preferred it to honest work, for it is futile
to assure us that a man of his abilities could not have supported
himself in a more orthodox way. Morally Raffles stood much
lower than the Bunny he despised and led astray; Bunny was not
an admirable citizen; but he had as great courage as his leader
and seducer and far greater unselfishness. Mr. Barry Pain’s Con-
stantine Dix was a better man than Raffles for he had the decency
to play a lone hand, and to spend his non-professional hours in
trying to stop others walking down the road he had taken. Yet
even he, a good man save for his profession, does not quite do as
a hero. In fact the tale of crime is best seen from the detective’s
angle.

The Great Detective Stories

(■927)

By Willard Huntington Wright

inroTTrirsir^^ oho{roooit>oo ho 0000000000000000000 hirhiroinrs’

Willard Huntington Wright {1888-ig^g) brought to detective
story criticism a mind and pen trained in professional evaluation
of literature and the arts. As S, Van Dine'* he was also quali-
fied to speak on the subject as a foremost if controversial Amer-
ican practitioner of the form. But this identity was still a closely
guarded secret when, under his legal name, he published his an-
thology The Great Detective Stories (New York: Scribner's, 192^)
with its detailed historical Introduction, reprinted here. In the
early 1920's Wright suffered a severe illness, brought on by over-
work in his profession as a critic of the arts. Forbidden by his
physician to do any '"serious" reading, he lightened the months of
a long convalescence by assembling and analyzing a 2,000-volume
library of detective fiction and criminology. To this fortuitous cir-
cumstance we owe not only the Philo Vance novels by Van Dine
but also the essay which follows. Many of Wright's more dog-
matic observations — his opposition to all "style" in the detective
novel is an extreme case in point — have been invalidated by the
passage of time; but this consideration should not be allowed to
overshadow his scholarly pioneer work in the historical aspects of
the subject.

There is a tendency among modern critics to gauge all novels
by a single literary standard — a standard, in fact, which should
be applied only to novels that patently seek a niche among the

54 Willard Huntington Wright

enduring works of imaginative letters. That all novels do not
aspire to such exalted company is obvious; and it is manifestly
unfair to judge them by a standard their creators deliberately
ignored. Novels of sheer entertainment belong in a different cate-
gory from those written for purposes of intellectual and aesthetic
stimulation; for they are fabricated in a spirit of evanescent di-
version, and avoid all the deeper concerns of art.

The novel designed purely for entertainment and the literary
novel spring, in the main, from quite different impulses. Their
objectives have almost nothing in common. The mental attitudes
underlying them are antipathetic: one is frankly superficial, the
other sedulously profound. They achieve diametrically opposed
results; and their appeals are psychologically unrelated; in fact,
they are unable to fulfil each other’s function; and the reader
who, at different times, can enjoy both without intellectual con-
flict, can never substitute the one for the other. Any attempt to
measure them by the same rules is as inconsistent as to criticize
a vaudeville performance and the plays of Shakespeare from the
same point of view, or to hold a musical comedy to the standards
by which we estimate the foremost grand opera. Even Schnitzler’s
Anatol may not be approached in the same critical frame of mind
that one brings to Hauptmann’s The Weavers; and if The Mi-
kado or Pinafore were held strictly to the musical canons of Parsi-
fal or Die Meis ter singer^ they would suffer unjustly. In the graphic
arts the same principle holds. Forain and Degas are not to be
judged by the aesthetic criteria we apply to Michelangelo’s draw-
ings and the paintings of Rubens.

There are four distinct varieties of the “popular,” or “light,”
novel — to wit: the romantic novel (dealing with young love, and
.-ending generally either at the hymeneal altar or with a prenuptial
embrace); the novel of adventure (in which physical action and
danger are the chief constituents: sea stories, wild-west yarns, odys-
seys of the African wilds, etc.); the mystery novel (wherein much
of the dramatic suspense is produced by hidden forces that are
not revealed until the denouement: novels of diplomatic intrigue,
international plottings, secret societies, crime, pseudoscience, spec-
ters, and the like); and the detective novel. These types often
overlap in content, and at times become so intermingled in

The Great Detective Stories

subject-matter that one is not quite sure in which category they pri-
marily belong. But though they may borrow devices and appeals
from one another, and usurp one another’s distinctive material,
they follow, in the main, their own special subject, and evolve
within their own boundaries.

Of these four kinds of literary entertainment the detective
novel is the youngest, the most complicated, the most difficult of
construction, and the most distinct. It is, in fact, almost sui gen-
eris^ and, except in its more general structural characteristics, has
little in common with its fellows — the romantic, the adventur-
ous, and the mystery novel. In one sense, to be sure, it is a highly
specialized offshoot of the last named; but the relationship is far
more distant than the average reader imagines.

If we are to understand the unique place held in modern let-
ters by the detective novel, we must first endeavor to determine
its peculiar appeal: for this appeal is fundamentally unrelated to
that of any other variety of fictional entertainment. What, then,
constitutes the hold that the detective novel has on all classes of
people — even those who would not stoop to read any other kind
of “popular” fiction? Why do we find men of high cultural at-
tainments — college professors, statesmen, scientists, philosophers,
and men concerned with the graver, more advanced, more intel-
lectual problems of life — passing by all other varieties of best-
seller novels, and going to the detective story for diversion and
relaxation?

The answer, I believe, is simply this: the detective novel does
not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but be-
longs rather in the category of riddles: it is, in fact, a complicated
and extended puzzle cast in fictional form. Its widespread popu-
larity and interest are due, at bottom and in essence, to the same
factors that give popularity and interest to the cross-word puzzle.
Indeed, the structure and mechanism of the cross-word puzzle
and of the detective novel are very similar. In each there is a prob-
lem to be solved; and the solution depends wholly on mental
processes— on analysis, on the fitting together of apparently un-

36 Willard Huntington Wright

related parts, on a knowledge of the ingredients, and, in some
measure, on guessing. Each is supplied with a series of overlap-
ping clues to guide the solver; and these clues, when fitted into
place, blaze the path for future progress. In each, when the final
solution is achieved, all the details are found to be woven into a
complete, interrelated, and closely knitted fabric.

There is confirmatory evidence of the mechanical impulse that
inspires the true detective novel when we consider what might
almost be called the dominant intellectual penchant of its inven-
tor. Poe, the originator of the modern detective story, was ob-
sessed with the idea of scientific experimentation. His faculty for
analysis manifested itself in his reviews and in the technicalities
of his poetry; it produced “MaelzeFs Chess-Player’'; it led him
into the speculative ramifications of handwriting idiosyncrasies
in “A Chapter on Autography”; it brought forth his exposition of
cryptograms and code-writing in ‘"Cryptography”; and it gave
birth to his acrostic verses. His four analytic stories — “The Mur-
ders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The
Gold-Bug,” and “The Purloined Letter” — ^were but a literary de-
velopment, or application, of the ideas and problems which al-
ways fascinated him. “The Gold-Bug,” in fact, was merely a fic-
tional presentation of “Cryptography.” (Incidentally, the number
of detective stories since Poe’s day that have hid their solutions
in cipher messages is legion.)

There is no more stimulating activity than that of the mind;
and there is no more exciting adventure than that of the intellect.
Mankind has always received keen enjoyment from the mental
gymnastics required in solving a riddle; and puzzles have been
its chief toy throughout the ages. But there is a great difference
between waiting placidly for the solution of a problem, and the
swift and exhilarating participation in the succeeding steps that
lead to the solution. In the average light novel of romance, ad-
venture, or mystery, the reader merely awaits the author’s un-
raveling of the tangled skein of events. True, during the waiting
period he is given emotion, wonder, suspense, sentiment and
description, with which to occupy himself; and the average novel
depends in large measure on these addenda to furnish his en-
joyment. But in the detective novel, as we shall see, these qualities

The Great Detective Stories

are either subordinated to ineffectuality, or else eliminated en-
tirely. The reader is immediately put to work, and kept busy in
every chapter, at the task of solving the book’s mystery. He shares
in the unfoldment of the problem in precisely the same way he
participates in the solution of any riddle to which he applies him-
self.

Because of this singularity of appeal the detective novel has
gone its own way irrespective of the progressus of all other fic-
tional types. It has set its own standards, drawn up its own rules,
adhered to its own heritages, advanced along its own narrow-gage
track, and created its own ingredients as well as its own form and
technic. And all these considerations have had to do with its own
isolated purpose, with its own special destiny. In the process of
this evolution it has withdrawn farther and farther from its lit-
erary fellows, until to-day it has practically reversed the principles
on which the ordinary popular novel is based.

A sense of reality is essential to the detective novel. The few
attempts that have been made to lift the detective-story plot out
of its naturalistic environment and confer on it an air of fanci-
fulness have been failures. A castles-in-Spain atmosphere, wherein
the reader may escape from the materiality of every day, often
gives the average popular novel its charm and readability; but
the objective of a detective novel — the mental reward attending
its solution — ^would be lost unless a sense of verisimilitude were
consistently maintained, — a. feeling of triviality would attach to
its problem, and the reader would experience a sense of wasted
effort. This is why in cross-word puzzles the words are all genu-
ine: their correct determination achieves a certain educational,
or at least serious, result. The “trick” cross-word puzzle with
coined words and purely iogomachic inventions (such as filling,
four boxes with e’s — e-e-e-e — for the word “ease,” or with i*s —
i-i-i-i~for the word “eyes,” or making u-u-u-u stand for the word
“use”) has never been popular. The philologic realism, so to
speak, is dissipated. A. E. W, Mason has said somewhere that De-
foe would have written the perfect detective story. He was re-
ferring to Defoe’s surpassing ability to create a realistic environ-
ment.

This rule of realism suggests the common literary practice of

g8 Willard Huntington Wright

endowing mises en scene with varying emotional pressures. And
here again the detective novel differs from its fictional confreres;
for, aside from the primary achievement of a sense of reality, at-
mospheres, in the descriptive and psychic sense, have no place
in this type of story. Once the reader has accepted the pseudo-
actuality of the plot, his energies are directed (like those of the
detective himself) to the working out of the puzzle; and his mood,
being an intellectual one, is only distracted by atmospheric inva-
sions. Atmospheres belong to the romantic and the adventurous
tale, such as Poe’s '‘The Fall of the House of Usher” and Scott’s
Ivanhoe^ and to the novel of mystery — Henry James’s The Turn
of the Screw and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for instance.

The setting of a detective story, however, is of cardinal im-
portance. The plot must appear to be an actual record of events
springing from the terrain of its operations; and the plans and
diagrams so often encountered in detective stories aid considera-
bly in the achievement of this effect. A familiarity with the ter-
rain and a belief in its existence are what give the reader his feel-
ing of ease and freedom in manipulating the factors of the plot
to his own (which are also the author’s) ends. Hampered by
strange conditions and modes of action, his personal participa-
tion in the story’s solution becomes restricted and his interest
in its sequiturs wanes. A detective novel is nearly always more
popular in the country in which it is laid than in a foreign coun-
try where the conditions, both human and topographic, are un-
familiar. The variations between English and American customs
and police methods, and mental and temperamental attributes,
are, of course, not nearly so marked as between those of America
and France; and no sharp distinction is now drawn between the
^ English and the American detective tale. But many of the best
French novels of this type have had indifferent sales in the United
States. Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room^ The
Perfume of the Lady in Blacky and The Secret of the Night have
never had their deserved popularity in this country because of
their foreign locales; but The Phantom of the Opera^ by the same
author, which is a sheer mystery story, has been a great success
here, due largely to that very unfamiliarity of setting that has
worked against the success of his detective novels.

The Great Detective Stories

111

In the matter of character-drawing the detective novel also
tands outside the rules governing ordinary fiction. Characters in
letective stories may not be too neutral and colorless, nor yet too
ully and intimately delineated. They should merely fulfil the
•equirements of plausibility, so that their actions will not appear

0 spring entirely from the author's preconceived scheme. Any
:losely drawn character analysis, any undue lingering over details
)f temperament, will act only as a clog in the narrative machinery.
The automaton of the cheap detective thriller detracts from the
eader’s eagerness to rectify the confusion of the plot; and the
ubtly limned personality of the ‘‘literary" detective novel shunts
he analytic operations of the reader's mind to extraneous con-
iderations. Think back over all the good detective stories you
nay have read, and try to recall a single memorable personality
(aside from the detective himself). And yet these characters were
)f sufficient color and rotundity to enlist your sympathetic emo-
ions at the time, and to drive you on to a solution of their prob-
ems.

The style of a detective story must be direct, simple, smooth,
ind unencumbered. A “literary" style, replete with descriptive
)assages, metaphors, and word pictures, which might give via-
)ility and beauty to a novel of romance or adventure, would, in

1 detective yarn, produce sluggishness in the actional current by
liverting the reader's mind from the mere record of facts (which
s what he is concerned with), and focussing it on irrelevant aes-
hetic appeals. I do not mean that the style of the detective novel
nust be bald and legalistic, or cast in the stark language of com-
mercial documentary exposition; but it must, like the style of
>efoe, subjugate itself to the function of producing unadorned
verisimilitude. No more is gained by stylizing a detective novel
han by printing a cross-word puzzle in Garamond Italic, or Clois-
er Cursive, or the Swash characters of Caslon Old-style.

The material for the plot of a detective novel must be com-
monplace. Indeed, there are a dozen adequate plots for this kind
»f story on the front page of almost any metropolitan daily paper.
Jnusualness, bimrrerie^ fantasy, or strangeness in subject-matter

40 Willard Huntington Wright

is rarely desirable; and herein we find another striking reversal
of the general rules applying to popular fiction; for originality
and eccentricity of plot may give a novel of adventure or mystery
its main interest. The task confronting the writer of detective fic-
tion is again the same confronting the cross-word-puzzle manu-
facturer — ^namely, the working of familiar materials into a dif-
ficult riddle. The skill of a detective story’s craftsmanship is re-
vealed in the way these materials are fitted together, the subtlety
with which the clues are presented, and the legitimate manner
in which the final solution is withheld.

Furtheimore, there is a strict ethical course of conduct imposed
upon the author. He must never once deliberately fool the reader:
he must succeed by ingenuity alone. The habit of inferior writers
of bringing forward false clues whose purpose is to mislead is as
much a form of cheating as if the cross-word-puzzle maker should
print false definitions to his words. The truth must at all times
be in the printed word, so that if the reader should go back over
the book he would find that the solution had been there all the
time if he had had sufficient shrewdness to grasp it. There was a
time when all manner of tricks, deceits, and far-fetched devices
were employed for the reader’s befuddlement; but as the detective
novel developed and the demsiid for straightforward puzzle stories
increased, all such methods were abrogated, and to-day we find
them only in the cheapest and most inconsequential examples of
this type of fiction.

In the central character of the detective novel — the detective
himself — ^we have, perhaps, the most important and original ele-
ment of the criminal-problem story. It is difficult to describe his
exact literary status, for he has no counterpart in any other fic-
tional genre. He is, at one and the same time, the outstanding
personality of the story (though he is concerned in it only in an
eX’parte capacity), the projection of the author, the embodiment
of the reader, the deus ex machina of the plot, the propounder of
the problem, the supplier of the clues, and the eventual solver
of the mystery. The life of the book takes place in him, yet the
life of the narrative has its being outside of him. In a lesser sense,
he is the Greek chorus of the drama. All good detective novels
have had for their protagonist a character of attractiveness and

The Great Detective Stories 41

interest, of high and fascinating attainments — a man at once hu-
man and unusual, colorful and gifted. The buffoon, the bungler,
the prig, the automaton — all such have failed. And sometimes in
an endeavor to be original an otherwise competent writer, mis-
judging the psychology of the situation, has presented us with a
farcical detective or a juvenile investigator, only to wonder, later
on, why these innovations failed. The more successful detective
stories have invariably given us such personalities as C. Auguste
Dupin, Monsieur Lecoq, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, Rou-
letabille. Dr. Fortune, Furneaux, Father Brown, Uncle Abner,
Richard Hannay, Arsine Lupin, Dawson, Martin Hewitt, Max
Carrados and Hanaud — to name but a few that come readily to
mind. All the books in which these characters appear do not fall
unqualifiedly into the true detective-story category; but in each
tale there are sufficient elements to permit broadly of the detec-
tive classification. Furthermore, these CEdipuses themselves are
not, in every instance, authentic sleuths: some are doctors of med-
icine, some professors of astronomy, some soldiers, some journal-
ists, some lawyers, and some reformed crooks. But their vocations
do not matter, for in this style of book the designation “detective”
is used generically.

We come now to what is perhaps the outstanding characteristic
of the detective novel: its unity of mood. To be sure, this is a
desideratum of all fiction; but the various moods of the ordinary
novel — ^such as love, romance, adventure, wonder, mystery— are
so closely related that they may be intermingled or alternated
without breaking the thread of interest; whereas, in the detec-
tive novel, the chief interest being that of mental analysis and the
overcoming of difficulties, any interpolation of purely emotional
moods produces the effect of irrelevancy — unless, of course, they
are integers of the equation and are subordinated to the main
theme. For instance, in none of the best detective novels will you
find a love interest, — Sherlock Holmes in mellow mood, holding
a lady s hand and murmuring amorous platitudes, would be un-
thinkable. And when a detective is sent scurrying on a long-
drawn-out adventure beset with physical dangers, the reader
fumes and frets until his hero is again in his armchair analyzing
clues and inquiring into motives.

42 Willard Huntington Wright

In this connection it is significant that the cinematograph has
never been able to project a detective story. The detective story,
in fact, is the only type of fiction that cannot be filmed. The test
of popular fiction — namely, its presentation in visual pictures, or
let us say, the visualizing of its word-pictures — ^goes to pieces when
applied to detective stories. The difficulties confronting a motion-
picture director in the screening of a detective tale are very much
the same as those he would encounter if he strove to film a cross-
word puzzle. The only serious attempt to transcribe a detective
story onto the screen was the case of Sherlock Holmes; and the
effort was made possible only by reducing the actual detective
elements to a minimum, and emphasizing all manner of irrelevant
dramatic and adventurous factors; for there is neither drama nor
adventure, in the conventional sense, in a good detective novel.

The origin of the detective novel need not concern us greatly.
Like all species of popular art, its beginnings are probably ob-
scure and confused. Enthusiastic critics have pointed to certain
tales in the Old Testament (such as Daniel’s cross-examination of
the elders in the story of Susanna) as examples of early crime-
detection. But if we were to extend our search into antiquity we
would probably find few ancient literatures that would not sup-
ply us with evidence of a sort. Persian sources are particularly
rich in stories that might be drawn into the detectival category.
The Turkish and the Sanscrit likewise furnish material for the
ancient-origin theory. And, of course, the Arabian The Thousand
Nights and a Night offers numerous exhibits of criminological
fiction. Herodotus, five centuries b.c., recounted what might be
termed a detective tale in the story of King Rhampsinitus’s
treasure-house — ^a story of a skilfully planned theft, the falsifying of
clues (no less an act than decapitation), the setting of traps for
the criminal, the clever eluding of these snares, and — ^what should
delight the modern romanticist ' — z *‘happy ending” when the
scalawag wins the hand of the princess. This ancient Greek tale,
by the way, might also be regarded as the inspiration for the com-
mon modern device of having a crime committed in a locked and

The Great Detective Stories 43

sealed room. But even the story of Rhampsinitus was not solely
Egyptian: Charles Johnston, of the Royal Asiatic Society, has
variously traced it, both in its general plot and its details, to the
Thibetan, the Italian, and the Indian. And we may find it, in its
essentials, retold in modern English and staring at us, in gaudy
wrappers, from the shelves of our favorite bookstore. Another
tale of Herodotus to which might be traced the prevalent cipher-
message device of the nineteenth-century detective-story writer
is the one which relates of the code pricked by Histiaios on the
bald head of his slave in order to convey a secret message to Aris-
tagoras. Chaucer has retold, in “The Tale of the Nun’s Priest,”
a story from Cicero’s De Divinatione; and the Gesta Romanorum
has long been a mine of suggestions for the modern writer of
crime-mystery fiction.

Antiquity unquestionably was familiar with all manner of tales
and legends that might be academically regarded as the antece-
dents of the modern detective story; and it is interesting to note
that the current connotation of the word clue (or clew) is de-
rived from the thread with which Ariadne supplied Theseus to
guide him safely from the Cretan labyrinth after he had slain the
Minotaur. However, all such genealogical researches for the re-
mote forebears of the modern crime story may best be left to the
antiquary, for they are irrelevant to our purpose, which is to
trace the origin and history of the specialized branch of literary
form called the detective novel. While many such tales may be
unearthed in the ancient records of imaginative narrative, they
did not become unified into a type until toward the latter half
of the nineteenth century; and it is from that time that the entire
evolution of this literary genre has taken place.

It would be possible, no doubt, to find indications of the later
detective novel in many books during the early decades of the
last century. Poe, however, is the authentic father of the detec-
tive novel as we know it to-day; and the evolution of this literary
type began with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The
Mystery of Marie Roget” (1845), “The Gold-Bug” (1843), and
“The Purloined Letter” (1845). In these four tales was born a
new and original type of fictional entertainment; and though
their structure has been modified, their method altered, their

44 Willard Huntington Wright

subject-matter expanded, and their craftsmanship developed, they
remain to-day almost perfect models of their kind; and they will
always so remain, because their fundamental psychological quali-
ties — the very essence of their appeal — embody the animating and
motivating forces in this branch of fiction. One can no more ig-
nore their basic form when writing a detective novel to-day than
one can ignore the form of Haydn when composing a symphony,
or the experimental researches of Monet and Pissarro when paint-
ing an impressionist painting.

For fifteen years after Poe there was little detective-story fiction
of an influential nature. Desultory and ineffectual attempts were
made to carry on the Auguste Dupin idea, chiefly in France,
where Poe's influence was very great. Perhaps the most note-
worthy is to be found in Dumas' Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848)
where D'Artagnan enacts the rdle of detective. But even here the
spirit of adventure overrides the spirit of deduction , — Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne is, after all, a sequel to Les Trois Mousquetaires,
Five years later, in 1853, came Dickens's Bleak House; and in this
novel appeared England's first authentic contribution to modern
detective fiction. This novel, to be sure, contains many elements
which to-day would not be tolerated in a strict detective story;
and its technic, as was inevitable, is more suited to the novel of
manners; but Inspector Bucket (who, by the way, was drawn from
Dickens's personal friend. Inspector Field of the Metropolitan
Police Force of London) is a character who deserves to rank with
Dupin and the famous fictional sleuths who came later. In The
Mystery of Edwin Drood (which unfortunately remained unfin-
ished at the time of Dickens's death in 1870) we have a straight-
away detective story which might almost be used as a model for
this type of fiction.

But ten years of criminal waters, so to speak, had passed under
the detectives' bridge when The Mystery of Edwin Drood ap-
peared; and Dickens cannot be regarded as, in any sense, a pre-
cursor, or even developer, of the crime-mystery technic. In i860
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White had been published; and
The Moonstone had followed eight years later, two years before
the world was aware of the mysterious murder of Edwin Drood
and the ensuing unresolved melodrama amid the picturesque pur-

The Great Detective Stories 45

lieus of old Rochester and the opium dens of ShadwelL Indeed,
it was Wilkie Collins who carried on the tradition of Poe in Eng-
land, and, by giving impetus to the detective-story idea and puri-
fying its technic, paved the way for Gaboriau. Sergeant Cuff,
though we hear his name but seldom to-day, deserves a larger and
more conspicuous niche among the literary immortals of crime
detection, for few of his later brethren have proved themselves
more efficient than did he when called upon to solve the mystery
of the great diamond which Colonel Hemcastle had secured. But
Collins, because of the nature of his numerous other books, will
always be classed as a dealer in adventures and mysteries, despite
his contributions to the evolution of strictly problematic crime
literature. At that early date the analytical crime story was not
considered worthy of any writer’s entire time and energy.

It was not until the appearance of Gaboriau’s U Affaire Lerouge
{The Widow Lerouge) in 1866, that the first great stride in the
detective novel’s development was taken. This book was the first
of a long series of detective novels by Gaboriau, in which the
protagonist, Monsieur Lecoq, proved himself a worthy successor
to Foe’s Auguste Dupin. If we call Poe the father of detective fic-
tion, Gaboriau was certainly its first influential tutor. He length-
ened its form along rigid deductional lines, and complicated and
elaborated its content. Le dossier No. {File No. 113), published
in 1867, has deservedly become a classic of its kind; and Mon-
sieur Lecoq ^ which appeared in 1869, will, despite the remarkable
fact that the criminal in the end outwits and eludes the sleuth,
always remain one of the world’s foremost detective stories. With
Gaboriau’s U Argent des autres {Other People's Money), published
posthumously in 1874 (Gaboriau died in 1873), the detective novel
was permanently launched, and during the past fifty years it has
taken a conspicuous and highly popular place in the fictional field.

But though Gaboriau remains to-day the foremost writer of de-
tective fiction during the period following Poe and Collins, men-
tion should in justice be made of that other French exponent of
the roman poUcier^ Fortune du Boisgobey, whose name is often

46 Willard Huntington Wright

bracketed with Gaboriau's. Boisgobey was a prolific writer of de-
tective fiction, and his work had the undoubted effect of popu-
larizing this type of story in France. Moreover, there is no doubt
that he influenced Conan Doyle, if, indeed, Doyle did not go to
him for actual suggestions. Boisgobey’s first detective work was
Le For gat colonel^ which appeared in 1872; and this was followed
by Les gredins^ La tresse blonde, Les Mysteres du nouveau Paris,
Le billet rouge, Le Cri du Sang, La bande rouge, and others. La
main froide was published as late as 1889.

Five years after the death of Gaboriau another writer of detec-
tive tales entered the field — the American, Anna Katharine Green
— and this author has hewed to the line for nearly half a century,
producing a large number of some of the best-known detective
novels in English. The Leavenworth Case, which appeared in
1878, had a tremendous popularity; but its importance lay in the
fact that it went far toward familiarizing the English-speaking
public with this, as yet, little-known genre, rather than in any in-
herent contribution made by it to the genre*s evolution. This
book and the numerous other detective novels written by the same
author appear to many of us to-day, who have become accustomed
to the complex, economical and highly rarified technic of detec-
tive fiction, as over-documented and as too intimately concerned
with strictly romantic material and humanistic considerations.
However, their excellent style, their convincing logic, and their
sense of reality give them a literary distinction almost unique in
the American criminal romance since Poe; and Mrs. Rohlfs’ de-
tective, Ebenezer Gryce, is as human and convincing a solver of
mysteries as this country has produced. There is little doubt that
the novels of Anna Katharine Green have played a significant part
in the historical evolution of the fiction of crime detection: cer-
tainly no roster of the foremost examples of this branch of lit-
erature would be complete without the inclusion of such books
of hers as Hand and Ring, Behind Closed Doors, The Filigree
Ball, The House of the Whispering Pines, and The Step on the
Stair,

A book which played a peculiar part in the history of the de-
tective novel is The Mystery of a Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume.
This story, based on the technic of Gaboriau and influenced by

The Great Detective Stories 47

the writings of Anna Katharine Green, represents what is per-
haps the greatest commercial success in the history of modem de-
tective fiction, and throws an interesting light on the* English pub-
lic’s avidity for this type of literary diversion during the closing
years of the nineteenth century. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
has sold over half a million copies to date, and the record of its
early editions is eloquently indicative of the fact that the detec-
tive novel as a definite genre had, even at that time, made a place
for itself in the Hall of Letters. The book, however, added noth-
ing new to the technic or the subject-matter of detective fiction,
but adhered sedulously to the lines already laid down.

Not until the appearance of A Study in Scarlet in 1887 (which,
incidentally, was the same year in which The Mystery of a Han-
som Cab appeared), and The Sign of Four in 1890, did the de-
tective novel take any definite forward step over Gaboriau. In
these books and the later Sherlock Holmes vehicles Conan Doyle
brought detective fiction into full-blown maturity. He adhered to
the documentary and psychological scaffolding that had been
erected by Poe and strengthened by Gaboriau, but clothed it in a
new exterior, eliminating much of the old decoration, and design-
ing various new architectural devices. In Doyle the detective story
reached what might be termed a purified fruition; and the nu-
merous changes and developments during the past two decades have
had to do largely with detail, with the substitution of methods,
and with variations in documentary treatment — ^in short, with
current modes.

But in as vital, intimate, and exigent a type of entertainment
as detective fiction, these modes are of great importance: they
mark the distinction between that which is modern and up-to-date
and that which is old-fashioned, just as do -the short skirt and
the long skirt in sartorial styles- The Sherlock Holmes stories are
now obsolescent: they have been superseded by more advanced
and contemporaneously alive productions in their own realm.
And the modern detective-story enthusiast would find it hard sled-
ding to read Gaboriau to-day — even Monsieur Lecoq and Le dos-
sier No, jjjf. Poe’s four analytic tales are a treasure-trove for the
student rather than a source of diversion for the general reader.
The romantic and adventurous atmosphere we find in “The Gold-

48 Willard Huntington Wright

Bug” has now been eliminated from the detective tale; and the
long introduction to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (really
an apologia), and the unnecessary documentation in “The Mys-
tery of Marie Roget,” act only as irritating encumbrances to the
modern reader of detective fiction. Even in “The Purloined Let-
ter” — the shortest of the four stories — there is a sesquipedalian
and somewhat ponderous analysis of philosophy and mathematics,
which is much too ritenendo and grandioso for the devotees of
this type of fiction to-day.

The first detective of conspicuous note to follow in the footsteps
of Sherlock Holmes was Martin Hewitt, the creation of Arthur
Morrison. Hewitt is less colorful than Holmes, less omnipotent,
and far more commonplace. He was once, Mr. Morrison tells us,
a lawyer’s clerk, and some of the dust of his legal surroundings
seems always to cling to him. But what he loses in perspicacity
and incredible gifts, he makes up for, in large measure, by veri-
similitude. His problems as a whole are less melodramatic and
bizarre than those of Holmes, except perhaps those in The Red
Triangle; and his methods are not as spectacular as those of his
Baker Street predecessor. An obvious attempt has been made by
Mr. Morrison to give to detective fiction an air of convincing
reality; and by his painstaking and even scholarly style he has
sought to appeal to a class of readers that might ordinarily repudi-
ate all interest in so inherently artificial a type of entertainment.

In R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thomdyke the purely scientific de-
tective made his appearance. Test tubes, microscopes, Bunsen
burners, retorts, and all the obscure paraphernalia of the chemist’s
and physicist’s laboratories are his stock in trade. In fact, Dr.
Thomdyke rarely attends an investigation without his case of im-
plements and his array of chemicals. Without his laboratory as-
sistant and jack-o£-all-trades, Polton, — coupled, of course, with his
ponderous but inevitable medico-legal logic — ^he would be help-
less in the face of mysteries which Sherlock Holmes and Monsieur
Lecoq might easily have clarified by a combination of observation,
mental analysis, and intuitive genius. Dr. Thomdyke is an elderly.

The Great Detective Stories

plodding, painstaking, humorless and amazingly dry sleuth, but
so original are his problems, so cleverly and clearly does he reach
bis solutions, and so well written are Dr. Freeman’s records, that
the Thorndyke books rank among the very best of modern de-
tective fiction. The amatory susceptibilities of his recording co-
adjutors are constantly intruding upon the doctor’s scientific
investigations and the reader s patience; but even with these ir-
relevant impediments most of the stories march briskly and com-
petently to their inevitable conclusions. Of all the scientific de-
tectives Dr. Thorndyke is unquestionably the most convincing.
His science, though at times obscure, is always sound: Dr. Free-
man writes authoritatively, and the reader is both instructed and
delighted,

Craig Kennedy, the scientific detective of Arthur B, Reeve, on
the other hand, is far less profound: he is, in fact, a pseudo-
scientist, utilizing all manner of strange divining machines and
speculative systems, and employing all the latest “discoveries” in
the realm of fantastic and theoretic physical research. He is not
unlike a composite of all the inventors and ballyhoo doctors of
science who regularly supply sensational research copy for the
Sunday Supplement magazines. But Mr, Reeve’s stories, despite
‘their failure to adhere to probability and to the accepted knowl-
edge of recognized experimenters in the scientific fields, are at
times ingenious and interesting, and there is little doubt that they
have had a marked influence on modern detective fiction. They
are unfortunately marred by a careless journalistic style. Among
the many Craig Kennedy volumes may be mentioned The Poi-
soned Pen^ The Dream Doctor, The Silent Bullet and The Treas-
ure-Train as containing the best of Mr. Reeve’s work.

Better written, conceived with greater moderation, and clinging
more closely to human probabilities, are John Rhode’s novels
dealing with Dr. Priestley’s adventures — Dr. Priestley's Quest,
The Paddington Mystery, and The Ellerby Case. Dr. — or, as he
is generally referred to in Mr. Rhode’s text, Professor — ^Priestley
has many characteristics in common with Dr, Thorndyke, He is
a schoolman, fairly well along in years, without a sense of humor,
and inclined to dryness; but he is more of the intellectual sci-
entist, or scientific thinker, than Dr. Freeman’s hero. (“Priestley,

50 Willard Huntington Wright

cursed with a restless brain and an almost immoral passion for the
highest branches of mathematics, occupied himself in skirmishing
round the portals of the universities, occasionally flinging a bomb
in the shape of a highly controversial thesis in some ultra-scientific
journal/') His detective cases to date have been few, and he suffers
by comparison with the superior Dr. Thorndyke.

VII

The purely intellectual detective — the professor with numer-
ous scholastic degrees, who depends on scientific reasoning and
rarefied logic for the answer to his problems — ^has become a popu-
lar figure in the fiction of crime detection. His most extravagant
personification — ^what might almost be termed the reductio ad
absurdum of this type of super-sleuth — is to be found in Jacques
Futrelle's Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, PH.D., LL.D.,
F.R.S., M.D., etc. The first book to recount the criminal mys-
teries that came under Professor Van Dusen's observation was The
Thinking Machine^ later republished as The Problem of Cell ly,
and this was followed by another volume of stories entitled The
Thinking Machine on the Case. These tales, despite their im-
probability — and often impossibility — ^nevertheless constitute at-
tractive diversion of the lighter sort.

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown — z quiet, plain little priest
who is now definitely established as one of the great probers of
mysteries in modern detective fiction — ^is also what might be
called an intellectual sleuth, although the subtleties of his anal-
yses depend, in large measure, on a kind of spiritual intuition —
the result of his deep knowledge of human frailties. Although
Father Brown does not spurn material clues as aids to his con-
clusions, he depends far more on his analyses of the human heart
and his wide experience with sin. At times he is obscure and sym-
bolic, even mystical; and too often the problems which Mr. Ches-
terton poses for him are based on crimes that are metaphysical
and unconvincing in their implications; but Father Brown’s con-
versational gifts— his commentaries, parables and observations —
are adequate compensation for the reader’s dubiety. The fact that
Father Brown is concerned with the moral, or religious, aspect,

The Great Detective Stories

rather than the legal status, of the criminals he runs to earth,
gives Mr. Chesterton’s stories an interesting distinction.

Similar in methods, but quite different in results, are the ex-
cellent stories by H. C. Bailey setting forth the cases of Dr. Regi-
nald Fortune. Dr. Fortune is an adjunct of Scotland Yard, a friend
and constant companion of Stanley Lomas who is a chief of the
Criminal Investigation Department. Like Father Brown, Dr. For-
tune is highly intuitional; and his final results depend on logic
and his knowledge of men rather than on the evidential and cir-
cumstantial indications of the average official police investigation.
And like Father Brown he has a gift for conversation and repartee
that makes even the most sordid and unconvincing of his cases
interesting, if not indeed fascinating. In addition, he is a man of
amazing gifts, with a wide range of almost incredible knowledge;
but so competent is Mr. Bailey’s craftsmanship that Dr. Fortune
rarely exceeds the bounds of probability. He has, in fact, in a very
short time (the first Fortune book, Call Mr, Fortune, appeared in
1919) made a permanent and unquestioned place for himself
among the first half-dozen protagonists of detective fiction.

Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s pompous little Belgian sleuth,
falls in the category of detectival logicians, and though his meth-
ods are also intuitional to the point of clairvoyance, he constantly
insists that his surprisingly accurate and often miraculous deduc-
tions are the inevitable results of the intensive operation of “the
little gray cells.” Poirot is more fantastic and far less credible than
his brother criminologists of the syllogistic fraternity, Dr, Priest-
ley, Father Brown and Reginald Fortune; and the stories in which
he figures are often so artificial, and their problems so far fetched,
that all sense of reality is lost, and consequently the interest in the
solution is vitiated. This is particularly true of the short stories
gathered into the volume Poirot Investigates, Poirot is to be seen
at his best in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on
the Links, The trick played on the reader in The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd is hardly a legitimate device of the detective-story
writer; and while Poirot’s work in this book is at times capable,
the effect is nullified by the denouement.

Of an entirely different personality, yet with dialectic methods
broadly akin to Father Brown's and Dr. Priestley’s, is Colonel

52 Willard Huntington Wright

Gore in Lynn Brock's The Deductions of Colonel Gore and Col-
onel Gore's Second Case, Colonel Gore, though ponderous and
verbose, is well projected, and the crimes he investigates are well
worked-out and admirably, if a bit too leisurely, presented. The
various characterizations of the minor as well as the major per-
sonages of the plots, and the long descriptions of social and topo-
graphical details, tend to detract from the problems involved; but
the competency of Mr. Brock’s writing carries one along despite
one’s occasional impatience. This fault is not to be found in Ern-
est M. Poate’s Behind Locked Doors and The Trouble at Pine-
lands, But Mr. Poate errs on the side of amatory romance, and in
Behind Locked Doors he introduces a puppy love affair which both
mars and retards what otherwise might have been one of the out-
standing modern detective novels. Even as it stands it must be
given high rank; and the figure of Dr. Bentiron — an eccentric but
lovable psychopathologist — ^will long remain in the memory of
those who make his acquaintance.

No list of what we may call the deductive detectives would be
complete without the name of A. E. W. Mason’s admirable Ha-
naud of the French Surety. Hanaud may almost be regarded as
the Gallic counterpart of Sherlock Holmes. The methods of these
two sleuths are similar: each depends on a combination of mate-
rial clues and spontaneous thinking; each is logical and painstak-
ing; and each has his own little tricks and deceptions and vani-
ties. The two Hanaud vehicles, At the Villa Rose and The House
of the Arrow y are excellent examples of detective fiction, carefully
constructed, consistently worked out, and pleasingly written. They
represent — especially the latter — the purest expression of this type
of literary divertissement; and Hanaud himself is a memorable
and engaging addition to the great growing army of fictional sleuths.
The psychological methods of crime detection, combined with an
adherence to the evidences of reality, are also followed in S. S.
Van Dine’s The Benson Murder Case and The Canary'' Murder
Case, wherein Philo Vance, a young social aristocrat and art con-
noisseur, enacts the rdle of criminologist and investigator.

Although the blind detective is a comparatively recent innova-
tion in crime-mystery fiction, his methods belong necessarily to
the logic-cwmdntuition school, despite the fact that all his pro-

The Great Detective Stories 53

cesses and conclusions are accounted for on strictly material and
scientific grounds. In the various attempts at novelty made by
recent detective-story writers the sightless crime specialist has been
frequently introduced, so that now he has become a recognized
and accepted type. The most engaging and the most easily accepted
of these unique detectives is Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, who
made his appearance in a volume bearing his name for title in
1914. To be sure, he was endowed with gifts which recalled the
strange powers of the citizens of H. G. Wells’s The Country of
the Blinds but so accurately and carefully has Mr. Bramah pro-
jected him that he must be given a place in the forefront of famous
fictional sleuths. Far more miraculous, and hence less convincing,
is the blind detective, Thornley Colton, who appears in a book
which also bears his name for title, by Clinton H. Stagg.

As soon as the detective story became popular it was inevitable
that the woman detective would make her appearance; and to-
day there are a score or more of female rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
The most charming and capable, as well as the most competently
conceived, is Violet Strange, who solves eight criminal problems
in Anna Katharine Green’s The Golden Slipper. Lady Molly, in
Lady Molly of Scotland Yard by the Baroness Orczy, is somewhat
more conventional in conception but sufficiently entertaining to
be regarded as a worthy deductive sister of Violet Strange. George
R. Sims, in Dorcas Dene^ Detective, has given us a feminine in-
vestigator of considerable quality; and Arthur B. Reeve’s Con-
stance Dunlap has resources and capabilities of a high, even if a
too melodramatic, order. Millicent Newberry, in Jeanette Lee’s
The Green Jacket, is an unusual and appealing figure — ^more a
corrector of destinies, perhaps, than a detective. And Richard
Marsh’s Judith Lee, in a book called simply Judith Lee, while not
technically a sleuth, happens upon the secret of many crimes
through her ability as a lip-reader.

VIII

So individual and diverse has become the latter-day fictional
detective that even a general classification is well-nigh impossible.
In Robert Barr’s Triumphs of Engine Valmont we have an

54 Willard Huntington Wright

Anglicized Frenchman of the old school who undertakes private
investigations of a too liberal latitude to qualify him at all times
as a crime specialist; but, despite his romantic adventurings and
his glaring failures, he unquestionably belongs in our category
of famous sleuths if only for the care and excellence with which
Mr. Barr has presented his experiences. Then there is the fat,
commonplace, unlovely and semi-illiterate, but withal sympathetic
and entertaining, Jim Hanvey of Octavus Roy Cohen’s book, Jim
Hanvey, Detective^ who knows all the crooks in Christendom and
is their friend; the nameless logician in the Baroness Orczy’s The
Old Man in the Corner and The Case of Miss Elliott^ who sits,
shabby and indifferent, at his caf^ table and holds penetrating
post mortems on the crimes of the day; Malcolm Sage, of Herbert
H. Jenkins’s Malcolm Sage, Detective, a fussy, bespectacled bache-
lor who runs a detective agency and uses methods as eccentric as
they are efficient; Lord Peter Wimsey, the debonair and deceptive
amateur of Dorothy *L. Sayers’s Whose Body?; Jefferson Hastings,
the pathetic, ungainly old-timer of the Washington Police, whose
mellow insight and shrewd deductions make first-rate reading in
The Bellamy Case, The Melrose Mystery and No Clue! by James
Hay, Jr.; and Inspectors Winter and Furneaux — that amusing and
capable brace of co-sleuths in Louis Tracy’s long list of detectme
novels.

The alienist detective is not a far cry from the pathologist de-
tective, and though there have been several doctors with a flair
for abnormal psychology who have enacted the rdle of criminal
investigator, it has remained for Anthony Wynne to give the psy-
chiatrist a permanent place in the annals of detection. In his Dr.
Hjiiley, the Harley Street specialist, (the best of whose cases is
related in The Sign of Evil,) we have an admirable detective char-
acter who mingles neurology with psychoanalysis and solves many
crimes which prove somewhat beyond the ken of the Scotland
Yard police. It was Henry James Forman, however, I believe, who
gave us the first strictly psychoanalytical detective novel in Guilt
— a story which, despite its unconventional ending and its singu-
larity of material, makes absorbing reading.

The reporter sleuth^ — or *Joumalistic crime expert” — ^has be-
come a popular figure in detective fiction on both sides of the

The Great Detective Stories

Atlantic, and to enumerate his various personalities and adven-
tures would be to fill several small-type pages with tabulations.
Most famous of this clan is Rouletabille of Gaston* Leroux's ex-
cellent detective novels, although J. S. Fletcher has created an
engaging rival to the little French reporter in the figure of Frank
Spargo who solves the gruesome mystery in The Middle Temple
Murder, Another reporter detective of memorable qualities and
personality is Robert Estabrook in Louis Dodge's Whispers; and
very recently there has appeared a book by Harry Stephen Keeler
— Find the Clock — in which a Chicago reporter named Jeff Dar-
rell acquires the right to sit among the select company of his fel-
low detective-journalists.

One of the truly outstanding figures in detective fiction is Uncle
Abner, whose criminal adventures are recounted by Melville
Davisson Post in Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries^ and in a
couple of short stories included in the volume, The Sleuth of St.
Jameses Square. Uncle Abner, indeed, is one of the very few de-
tectives deserving to be ranked with that immortal triumverate,
Dupin, Lecoq and Holmes; and I have often marveled at the omis-
sion of his name from the various articles and criticisms I have
seen dealing with detective fiction. In conception, execution, de-
vice and general literary quality these stories of early Virginia,
written by a man who thoroughly knows his mitier and is also
an expert in law and criminology, are among the very best we
possess. The grim and lovable Uncle Abner is a vivid and con-
vincing character, and the plots of his experiences with crime are
as unusual as they are convincing, Mr. Post is the first author
who, to my knowledge, has used the phonetic misspelling in a
document supposedly written by a deaf and dumb man as a proof
of its having been forged. (The device is found in the story called
“An Act of God/') If Mr. Post had written only Uncle Abner he
would be deserving of inclusion among the foremost of detective-
fiction writers, but in The Sleuth of St. James's Square^ and espe-
cially in Monsieur Jonquelle^ he has achieved a type of highly
capable and engrossing crime-mystery tale. The story called
“The Great Cipher" in the latter book is, with the possible
exception of Poe's “The Gold-Bug," the best cipher story in
English.

50 Willard Huntington Wright

Another distinctive detective, but one of an entirely different
character, is Chief Inspector William Dawson of Bennett Copple-
stone’s The Diversions of Dawson and The Lost Naval Papers —
the latter a series of secret-service stories. There is humor in Mr.
Copplestone’s delineation of Dawson, but the humor is never flip-
pant and does not, in any sense, detract from the interest of the
cases in which this rather commonplace, but none the less remark-
able, Scotland Yard master of disguise plays the leading role. In
fact, the humor is so skilfully interwoven in the plots, and is pre-
sented with such consummate naturalness, that it heightens both
the character drawing of Dawson and the fascination of the prob-
lems he is set to solve. The literary quality of Mr. Copplestone's
books is of a high order, and goes far toward placing them among
the best of their genre that England has produced. Dawson, for
ail his shortcomings and conventional devices, is a figure of actu-
ality, with the artificial mechanics of' his craft reduced to a mini-
mum.

John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, who runs through a series of
novels {The Thirty-Nine Steps^ Greenmantle, Mr. Standfast and
The Three Hostages), is a figure of unforgettable attraction —
slow-moving yet shrewd, sentimental yet efficient — although only
in the last named of the four books does he play a strictly de-
tectival role, his other “cases” being of a purely adventurous or
secret-service nature. A delightful type of detective — debonair,
whimsical, yet withal penetrating — is Antony Gillingham of A. A.
Milne’s The Red House Mystery — one of the best detective stories
of recent years, as well developed as it is well written. I regret
that Mr. Milne has seen fit to let his reputation as a writer of de-
tective tales rest on this single volume. Philip Trent, the some-
what baffled nemesis of E. C. Bentley’s Trent's Last Case^ is highly
engaging, despite the fact that his elaborate deductions, based on
circumstantial evidence, lead him woefully astray. Mr. Bentley’s
book, though unconventional in conception, is, in its way, a mas-
terpiece. Another detective deserving of mention alongside of
Antony Gillingham and Philip Trent is Anthony Gethryn, the
solver of the criminal riddle in Philip MacDonald’s entertaining
book. The Rmp — which, incidentally, is Gethryn’s sole vehicle of
deduction.

The Great Detective Stories

Eden Phiilpotts has written some of the best detective stories
in English. Not only has he proved himself a student of this type
of literary entertainment, but he has brought to his task a life-
long experience in the craft of writing. The Grey Room was the
first of his essays in this field, and, for all its unconventionality of
structure, immediately took its place among the leading mystery
stories of the day. This was followed by The Red Redmaynes
(a more elaborately worked-out detective novel), A Voice from
the Dark, and Jig-Saw. Both in craftsmanship and ingenuity Mr.
Phillpotts’s detective tales — ^all of which are of a high order —
seem intimately related to the novels of Harrington Hcxt— The
Thing at Their Heels, Who Killed Cock Robinf, The Monster,
and Number 8y. (The last is a scientific mystery story rather than
a straight detective novel.) Who Killed Cock Robinf is of con-
ventional pattern and technic, but its adroitness entitles it to the
first rank; The Monster, for sheer cleverness and suspense, has
few equals in contemporary detective fiction; and The Thing at
Their Heels, though ignoring the accepted canons of detective-
story writing, must be placed in this category with an asterisk of
distinction marking it.

A popular and prolific novelist who has long been regarded as
a detective-story writer is E. Phillips Oppenheim; but while he
has written several books of detective stories, they represent his
secondary work, and have little place in a library devoted to the
best of crime-problem fiction. Mr. Oppenheim is primarily a
writer of mystery romances and stories of diplomatic intrigue;
the latter, in fact, are his forte. Even in his best-known so-called
detective books — ^such as Peter Ruff, The Double Four, The Yel-
low Crayon, and The Honorable Algernon Knox, Detective—
complications of international diplomacy and of the secret serv-
ice greatly overbalance the criminological research and deduc-
tions that are essential to the true detective story. Nicholas Goade,
Detective comes nearer to the detectival technic than any of Mr.
Oppenheim^s other books; but aside from its being a careless and
inferior work, it is filled with irrelevancies of a romantic and ad-

58 Willard Huntington Wright

venturous nature. Nor are its criminal problems o£ any particular
originality.

Among the most entertaining and adroitly written of modern
detective novels must be placed Ronald A. Knox’s two semi-
satirical books, The Viaduct Murder and The Three Taps. These
stories attain to a high literary level, and though the amateur
detective of the first fails in his deductions, and the “murder” in
the second proves to be a disappointment — both of which devices
are contrary to all the accepted traditions of the detective-story
technic — these two books sedulously and intelligently follow the
clues of their problems to a logical solution, and unflaggingly hold
the reader’s interest and admiration. Two other writers of marked
literary capacity have tried their hand at the detective novel —
Arnold Bennett and Israel Zangwill — ^with entertaining, if not
wholly satisfactory, results. Mr. Bennett’s The Grand Babylon
Hotel, though a detective story only through association and im-
plication, contains several adventures that bring the book broadly
within the detective category. Mr. Zangwill’s The Big Bow Mys-
tery is more in line with the tradition of the detective novel,
despite the fact that its theme contraverts one of the basic prin-
ciples of crime-problem fiction.

Mrs. Belloc Lowndes has made two interesting and noteworthy
contributions to criminal literature: indeed, any review of the
more important detective stories would be incomplete without
an inclusion of her The Chink in the Armour and The Lodger,
the latter dealing with the famous Jack-the-Ripper murders. Bur-
ton E. Stevenson has also given us several first-rate detective novels
of orthodox pattern — The Halladay Case, The Gloved Hand, The
Marathon Mystery, and The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet — the
last being particularly well conceived and executed. Edgar Wal-
lace has written too much and too rapidly, with too little atten-
tion to his problems and too great an insistence on inexpensive
'^thrills/’ to be included in the roster of the ablest detective-tale
authors; but The Clue of the New Pin— one of his earlier books
— should be mentioned here because of the ingenious device used
by the criminal to escape detection. Arthur E. McFarland’s Behind
the Bolted Door? is another detective novel which contains an en-
tirely novel (so far as I know) device; and the interest of the story

The Great Detective Stories

is markedly enhanced by Mr. McFarland’s journalistic compe-
tency as a writer and his thorough familiarity with the various
factors of his locale. Marion Harvey’s The Mystery of the Hidden
Room is likewise noteworthy because of the criminal device em-
ployed; and it should be added that the deductive work done by
Graydon McKelvie is at times extremely clever. The four Ashton
Kirk novels by John T. McIntyre — Ashton Kirk, Investigator,
Ashton Kirk, Secret Agents Ashton Kirk, Special Detective, and
Ashton Kirk, Criminologist — ^are a bit extravagant both in char-
acterization and plot, but they may be justly mentioned here be-
cause of their strict adherence to the Sherlock Holmes tradition
and their occasional ingenuity of structure.

Fashions in detectives have changed greatly during the past
decade or so. Of late the inspired, intuitive, brilliantly logical
super-sleuth of the late nineteenth century has given place to the
conservative, plodding, hard working, routine investigator of the
ofiicial police — the genius of Carlyle’s definition, whose procedure
is based largely on a transcendent capacity of taking trouble. And
it must be said that this new thoroughgoing and unimaginative
detective often has a distinct advantage, from the standpoint of
literary interest, over the flashy intellectual detective of yore. He
is more human, more plausible, and often achieves a more satis-
factory solution of the criminal mysteries to whiqh he is assigned.
The reader may follow him as an equal, and share in his discov-
eries; and at all times a sense of reality, even of commonplace
familiarity, may be maintained by the author — ^a sense which is
too often vitiated by the inspirational methods of the older de-
tective.

The most skilful exponent of this style of detective story is Free-
man Wills Crofts. His The Cask and The Ponson Case are mas-
terpieces of closely-wrought construction, and, with The Groote
Park Murder, Inspector Frenches Greatest Case and The Starvel
Hollow Tragedy, stand as the foremost representatives of their
kind— as much as do the novels of Gaboriau and the Holmes
series of Conan Doyle. Indeed, for sheer dexterity of plot Mr,

Willard Huntington Wright

Crofts has no peer among the contemporary writers of detective
fiction. His chief device is the prepared alibi, and this he has ex-
plored with almost inexhaustible care, weaving it into his prob-
lem with an industry matched only by the amazing industry of
his sleuths.

A. Fielding has devoted his talents to this new mode of detec-
tive fiction with a success but little less than Mr. Crofts'. In The
Footsteps that Stopped he has worked out an intricate problem
along the painstaking lines of investigation characteristic of the
actual methods of Scotland Yard; and in both The Eames-Erskine
Case and The Charteris Mystery he has successfully followed these
same methods. The Detective's Holiday^ by Charles Barry, is an-
other good example of the plodding, naturalistic detective tech-
nic, enlivened by a foil in the presence of a typical French detec-
tive of contrasting subtlety and emotionalism. And Henry Wade's
The Verdict of You All is 2 l first-rate story conceived along the
same lines; but it breaks away from all tradition in the climax,
and turns its denouement into an ironical criticism of legal pro-
cedure — a device which had a famous precedent in The Ware
Case by George PleydelL Two earlier capable examples of the
detective novel of industrious routine are A. W. Marchmont's
The Eagrave Square Mystery and Mark Allerton’s The Mystery
of Beaton Craig,

In the same classification with Crofts, Fielding and Wade be-
longs J, S. Fletcher, the most prolific and popular of all the cur-
rent writers of detective fiction. Mr. Fletcher, however, carries
his naturalism so far in the projection of his plots that his de-
tectives are too often banal and colorless; and in many of his
books the solution of the crime is reached through a series of
fortuitous incidents rather than through any inherent ability on
the part of his investigators. Mr. Fletcher writes smoothly, and
his antiquarian researches — ^which he habitually weaves into the
fabric of his plots-— give an air of scholarship to his stories. But
his problems and their solutions are too frequently deficient in
drama and sequence, and his paucity of invention is too consist-
ently glaring to be entirely satisfactory- This may be due to the
frequency with which his books appear: I believe he has pub-
lished something like four a year for the past eight or ten years;

The Great Detective Stories 6i

and such mass production is hardly conducive of conceptional
care and structural ingenuity. But Mr. Fletcher has none the less
played an important part in the development of the detective
novel, if for no other reason than that he has, by his fluent style
and authoritative realism, given an impetus to the reading of this
type of novel among a large class of persons who, but a few years
ago, were unfamiliar with the literature of crime detection. Mr.
Fletcher’s earlier books are his best; and I have yet to read one
of his more recent novels that equals his The Middle Temple
Murder published ten years ago.

It will be noted that the great majority of detective stories I
have selected for mention are by English authors. The reason for
the decided superiority of English detective stories over Ameri-
can detective stories lies in the fact that the English novelist takes
this type of fiction more seriously than we do. The best of the
current writers in England will turn their hand occasionally to
this genre, and perform their task with the same conscientious
care that they confer on their more serious books. The American
novelist, when he essays to write this kind of story, does so with
contempt and carelessness, and rarely takes the time to acquaint
himself with his subject. He labors under the delusion that a de-
tective novel is an easy and casual kind of literary composition;
and the result is a complete failure. In this country we have few
detective novels of the superior order of such books as Bentley’s
Trents Last Case^ Mason’s The House of the Arrow j Crofts’ The
Cask^ Hext’s Who Killed Cock Robinf^ Phillpotts’s The Red Red-
maynes. Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris^ Knox’s The Viaduct Mur-
der^ Fielding’s The Footsteps That Stopped^ Milne’s The Red
House Mystery^ Bailey’s Mr. Fortune series, and Chesterton’s
Father Brown stories, to mention but a scant dozen of the more *
noteworthy additions to England’s rapidly increasing detective
library.

In the foregoing brief resume of the detective fiction which
followed upon the appearance of the Sherlock Holmes stories I
have confined myself to English and American efforts. We must

62 Willard Huntington Wright

not, however, overlook the many excellent detective stories that
have come out of France since the advent of Monsieur Lecoq. The
Gallic temperament seems particularly well adapted to the subtle-
ties and intricacies of the detective novel; and a large number of
books of the roman policier type have been published in France
during the past half century, most of them as yet untranslated
into English. The foremost of the modern French writers of de-
tective fiction is Gaston Leroux; in fact, the half dozen or so
novels comprising the Aventures Extraordinaires de Joseph Rou-
letabillej Reporter are among the finest examples of detective
stories we possess. Le Mystere de la Chambre Jaune {The Mystery
of the Yellow Room), Le Parfum de la Dame en Noir {The Per-
fume of the Lady in Black)^ Rouletabille chez le Tsar {The Se-
cret of the Night), Le Chateau Noir, Les Etranges Noces de Rou-
letabille, Rouletabille chez Krupp and Le Crime de Rouletabille
{The Phantom Clue) represent the highest standard reached by
the detective novel in France since the literary demise of Lecoq,
and contain a variety of ideas and settings which gives them a
diversity of appeal. Rouletabille is engagingly drawn, and his
personality holds the reader throughout.

More popular, and certainly more ingenious, though neither as
scholarly nor as strictly orthodox, are the famous Arsene Lupin
stories of Maurice Leblanc. Lupin in the records of his earlier ad-
ventures is a shrewd and dashing criminal — ''un gentleman-
cambrioleuf — and therefore quite the reverse of the regulation
detective; but he indulges in detective work — in deductions, in
the following of clues, in the subtleties of logic, and in the solu-
tion of criminal problems — ^which is as brilliant and traditional
as that of any fictional officer of the Surety. In his more recent
escapade he gives over his anti-legal propensities, and becomes
a sleuth wholly allied with the powers of righteousness. Some of
the best and most characteristic examples of conventional modern
detective stories are to be found in Les Huit Coups de VHorloge.
To the solution of the criminal problems involved in this book
Lupin brings not only a keen and penetrating mind, but the fruits
of a vast first-hand experience with crime.

Germany*s efforts at the exacting art of detective-story writing
are, in the main, abortive and ponderous. An air of heavy official-

The Great Detective Stories 63

dom hangs over the great majority of them; and one rarely finds
the amateur investigator — that most delightful of all detectives —
as the central figure of German crime-problem stories. The hero
is generally a hide-bound, system-worshiping oflScer of the Polizei;
and sometimes as many as three detectives share the honor of
bringing a malefactor to justice. Even the best of the Germanic
attempts at this literary genre read somewhat like painstaking of-
ficial reports, lacking imagination and dramatic suspense. There
is little subtlety either in the plots or the solutions; and the meth-
ods employed are generally obvious and heavy-footed. Character-
istic of the German detective story are the books of Dietrich The-
den — Der Advokatenhauery Die zweite Busse, Ein Verteidiger,
and a volume of short stories entitled Das lange Wunder. And
among the other better-known works of this type might be men-
tioned J. Kaulbach’s Die weisse Nelke^ P. Weise's Der Rottnerhof,
R. Kohlrausch's In der Dunkelkammer, and P. Meissner's Plata-
nen-Allee Nr. 14. Karl Rosner, the author of Der Herr des Todes
and Die Beichte des Herrn Moritz von Cleven^ is also one of the
leading German writers of detective stories.

The Austrian authors who have devoted their energies to
crime-problem fiction follow closely along German lines, though
we occasionally find in them a lighter and more imaginative at-
titude, although here, too, a stodgy ofiBcialism and a reportorial
brevity detract from the dramatic interest. Balduin Groller is per-
haps the most capable and inventive of the Austrian detective-
story writers: his Detektiv Dagobert is perhaps Austria's nearest
approach to Sherlock Holmes. Adolph Weissl (who was, I be-
lieve, a former official of the Vienna police) also has an extensive
reputation as a writer of detective stories. His best-known, per-
haps, are Schwarze Perlen and Das grilne Auto. The latter has
been translated into English under the title of The Green Motor
Car.

The other European countries are also far behind France and
England in the production of this kind of narrative entertain-
ment. Russia is too deeply sunk in Zolaesque naturalism to be in-
terested in sheer literary artifice, and the detective novel as a
genre is unknown to that country. Only in occasional stories do
we find even an indication of it, although when a Russian author

64 Willard Huntington Wright

does turn his hand to crime detection he endows his work with a
convincing realism. Italy's creative spirit is not sufficiently men-
talized and detached to maintain the detective-story mood; but
Olivieri, in 11 Colonnelloj and Ottolengui, in Suo Figlio, have
given us fairly representative examples of the detective tale; and
Luigi Capuana has written several stories which may broadly be
classed as “detective.” The Pole, Carl von Trojanowsky, has wit-
ten, among other books, Erzdhlungen eines Gerichtsarztes; but
this work cannot qualify wholly as detective fiction. There are,
however, certain indications that the Scandinavian countries may
soon enter the field as competitors of France and England and
America, A Swedish writer, under the nom de guerre of Frank
Heller, has had a tremendous success in Europe with a series of
novels setting forth the exploits of a Mr. Collin — a kind of Con-
tinental Raffles — and several of his books have been translated
into English: The London Adventures of Mr, Collin^ The Grand
Duke's Finances, The Emperor's Old Clothes, The Strange Ad-
ventures of Mr. Collin, and Mr. Collin Is Ruined. They are not,
however, true detective novels; but the germ of the species is in
them, and they indicate an unmistakable tendency toward the
Poe-Gaboriau-Doyle tradition. Far more orthodox, and with a
firmer grasp of the principles of detective-fiction technic, are the
books of the Danish writer, Sven Elvestad — Der rdtselhafte Feind,
Abbe Montrose, Das Chamdleon and Spuren im Schnee. Elvestad
also writes detective stories under the name of Stein Riverton.
Then there is the popular Norwegian author, Oevre Richter
Frich, whose detective, Asbjorn Krag, is almost as well known in
Norway as Holmes is in England*

XII

So much confusion exists regarding the limits and true nature
of the detective story, and so often is this genre erroneously classi-
fied with the secret-service story and the crime story, that a word
may properly be said about the very definite distinctions that ex-
ist between the latter type and the specialized detective type.
While the secret-service story very often depends on an analysis
of dues and on deductive reasoning, and while it also possesses

The Great Detective Stories 65

a protagonist whose task is the unearthing of secrets and the
thwarting of plots, these conditions are not essential to it; and
herein lies a fundamental difiEerence between the secret-service
agent and the regulation detective. The one is, in the essence of
his profession, an adventurer, whereas the other is a deus ex ma-
china whose object it is to solve a given problem and thereby
bring a criminal to book. No matter how liberally the secret-
service story may have borrowed from the methods of detective
fiction, its growth has been along fundamentally different lines
from those of detective fiction; and during the past few decades
it has developed a distinctive technic and evolved a structure char-
acteristically its own. It is true that famous fictional detectives
have, on occasion, been shunted successfully to secret-service work
(like Dawson in The Lost Naval Papers ^ Hannay in Greenmantle
and The ThirtyNine Steps, Max Carrados in “The Coin of Di-
onysius,*' and even Sherlock Holmes in an occasional adventure);
but these variations have, in no wise, brought the secret-service
story into the strict category of detective fiction. That the appeals
in these two literary types are often closely related, is granted;
but this fact is incidental rather than necessary.

The best and truest type of secret-service story may be found
in the writings of William Le Queux — in 7 'he Invasion, Donovan
of Whitehall, The CzaPs Spy, and The Mystery of the Green Ray,
for instance. And the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim contain
many of the most capable and diverting stories of this type to be
found in English. Lord Frederic Hamilton has introduced a
welcome element of novelty into the secret-service formula by
way of his P. J. Davenant series — Nine Holiday Adventures of Mr.
P. J. Davenant, Some Further Adventures of Mr. P. J. Davenant,
The Education of Mr. P. J. Davenant, and The Beginnings of Mr.
P. J. Davenant. Robert Allen, in Captain Gardiner of the Interna-
tional Police, has given us a first-rate secret-service-adventure
book; and J. A. Ferguson, in The Stealthy Terror, has created
noteworthy entertainment in this field. One of the best of recent
secret-service romances is J. Aubrey Tyson s The Scarlet Tanager;
and in The Unseen Hand Clarence Herbert New has written a
series of diplomatic adventures which rank high as fictional secret-
service documents. But for all the superficial similarity between

66 Willard Huntington Wright

these books and the detective adventures of the official and un-
official peace-time sleuths, the secret-service narrative has played
no part in the narrow and intensive process of the detective story^s
evolution; and in its more rigid projections it differs radically
from the definite and highly specialized form of detective fiction.

This is likewise true of the crime story wherein the criminal is
the hero — for example, the stories of Raffles by E. W. Hornung,
and the early adventures of Maurice Leblanc's Arsine Lupin.
Both in appeal and technic the detective tale and the criminal-
hero tale are basically unlike. The author of the latter must, first
of all, arouse the reader's sympathy by endowing his hero with
humanitarian qualities (the picturesque Robin Hood is almost
as well known to-day for his philanthropy as for his brigandage);
and, even when this lenient attitude has been evoked, the intel-
lectual activity exerted by the reader in an effort to solve the
book's problem is minimized by the fact that all the knots in the
tangled skein have been tied before his eyes by the central char-
acter. Moreover, there is absent from his quest that ethical en-
thusiasm which is always a stimulus to the follower of an upright
detective tracking down an enemy of society — a society of which
the reader is a member and therefore exposed to the dangers of
anti-social plottings on the part of the criminal. The projection
of oneself into the machinations of a super-criminal (such as
Wyndham Martin's Anthony Trent) is a physical and adventur-
ous emotion, whereas the cooperation extended by the reader to
his favorite detective is wholly a mental proce^. Even Vautrin,
Balzac's great criminal hero, does not inspire the reader with emo-
tions or reactions in any sense similar to those produced by
Dupin, Monsieur Lecoq, Holmes, Father Brown, or Uncle Ab-
ner. And for all the moral platitudes of Barry Pain's Constantine
Dix and the inherently decent qualities of Louis Joseph Vance's
Lone Wolf — ^both of whom had the courage to war upon society
single-handed — ^we cannot accept them in the same spirit, or with
the same sense of partnership, that we extend to the great sleuths
of fiction, who have the organized police of the world at their
back. The hero of detective fiction must stand outside of the plot,
so to speak: his task is one of ferreting out impersonal mysteries;

The Great Detective Stories 67

and he must come to his work with no more intimate relation-
ship to the problem than is possessed by the reader himself.

XIII

The subject-matter of a detective story — that is, the devices
used by the criminal and the methods of deduction resorted to by
the detective — is a matter of cardinal importance. The habitual
reader of the detective novel has, during the past quarter of a
century, become a shrewd critic of its technic and means. He is
something of an expert, and, like the motion-picture enthusiast,
is thoroughly familiar with all the devices and methods of his
favorite craft. He knows immediately if a story is old-fashioned,
if its tricks are hackneyed, or if its approach to its problem con-
tains elements of originality. And he judges it by its ever shifting
and developing rules. Because of this perspicacious attitude on his
part a stricter form and a greater ingenuity have been imposed on
the writer; and the fashions and inventions of yesterday are no
longer used except by the inept and uninformed author.

For example, such devices as the dog that does not bark and
thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is a familiar personage
(Doyle's '^Silver Blaze" and the Baronness Orczy’s “The York
Mystery"); the establishing of the culprit’s identity by dental ir-
regularities (Freeman’s “The Funeral Pyre," Leblanc’s Les Dents
du Tigre^ and Morrison’s “The Case of Mr. Foggatt”); the finding
of a distinctive cigarette or cigar at the scene of the crime (used
several times in the Raffles stories, in Knox’s The Three Taps,
Groller’s Die feinen Zigarren, and Doyle’s “The Boscombe Valley
Mystery"); the cipher message containing the crime’s solution
(Wynne’s The Double Thirteen, Freeman’s “The Moabite Cipher"
and “The Blue Scarab," and Doyle’s “The Adventure of the
Dancing Men"); the murdering — ^generally stabbing — of a man in
a locked room after the police have broken in (Chesterton’s “The
Wrong Shape," ZangwilFs The Big Bow Mystery, and Caroline
Wells’s Spooky Hollow); the commission of the murder by an ani-
mal (Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Doyle’s “The
Speckled Band" and The Hound of the Baskervilks); the phono-

68 Willard Huntington Wright

graph alibi (Freeman’s “Mr. Pointing’s Alibi” and Doyle’s “The
Adventure of the Mazarin Stone”); the shooting of a dagger from
a gun or other projecting machine to avoid proximity (Freeman’s
“The Aluminium Dagger” and Phillpotts’s Jig-Saw); the spixitu-
alistic seance or ghostly apparition to frighten the culprit into a
confession (McFarland’s Behind the Bolted Door? and Phillpotts’s
A Voice from the Dark); the “psychological” word-association test
for guilt (Kennedy’s The Scientific Cracksman and Poate’s Behind
Locked Doors); the dummy figure to establish a false alibi (Mac-
Donald’s The Rasp and Doyle’s “The Empty House”); the forged
fingerprints (Freeman’s The Red Thumb Mark and The Cat's
Eyej and Stevenson’s The Gloved Hand), — these, and a score of
other devices, have now been relegated to the discard; and the
author who would again employ them would have no just claim
to the affections or even the respect of his readers.

G. K, Chesterton, in his introduction to a detective story by
Walter S. Masterman, gives a list of many of the devices that have
now come to be regarded as antiquated. He says: “The things he
[Mr. Masterman] does not do are the things being done every-
where to-day to the destruction of true detective fiction and the
loss of this legitimate and delightful form of art. He does not
introduce into the story a vast but invisible secret society with
branches in every part of the world, with ruffians who can be
brought in to do anything or underground cellars that can be
used to hide anybody. He does not mar the pure and lovely out-
lines of a classical murder or burglary by wreathing it round and
round with the dirty and dingy red tape of international diplo-
macy; he does not lower our lofty ideas of crime to the level of
foreign politics. He does not introduce suddenly at the end some-
body’s brother from New Zealand, who is exactly like him. He
does not trace the crime hurriedly in the last page or two to some
totally insignificant character, whom we never suspected because
we never remembered. He does not get over the difficulty of choos-
ing between the hero and the villain by falling back on the hero’s
cabman or the villain’s valet. He does not introduce a professional
criminal to take the blame of a private crime; a thoroughly un-
sportsmanlike course of action, and another proof of how profes-
sionalism is ruining our national sense of sport. He does not in-

The Great Detective Stories 69

troduce about six people in succession to do little bits of the same
small murder, one man to bring the dagger, and another to point
it, and another to stick it in properly. He does not say it was all
a mistake, and that nobody ever meant to murder anybody at all,
to the serious disappointment of all humane and sympathetic
readers. . .

But, strangely enough, Mr. Masterman does something much
worse and more inexcusable than any of the things Mr. Chester-
ton enumerates, — he traces the crime to the detective himselfl
Such a trick is neither new nor legitimate, and the reader feels
not th^at he has been deceived fairly by a more skilful mind than
his own, but deliberately lied to by an inferior. To a certain ex-
tent Gaston Leroux is guilty of this subterfuge in The Mystery
of the Yellow Room; but here Rouletabille, and not the guilty
detective, is the central nemesis; and it is the former’s ingenious
probing and reasoning that unmasks the culprit. A similar situa-
tion is to be found in the story called “The Cat Burglar” in H. C.
Bailey’s Mr. Fortune, Please, and also in The Winning Clue by
James Hay, Jr. In Israel ZangwilFs The Big Bow Mystery the
device is again used; but here it is entirely legitimate, for the situa-
tion consists of a specified and recognized battle of wits, A varia-
tion of this trick is resorted to in one of Agatha Christie’s Poirot
books — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — but without any extenu-
ating circumstances.

In this connection it should be pointed out that a certain “gen-
tleman’s agreement” has grown up between the detective-story
writer and the public — the outcome of a definite development in
the relationship necessary for the projection of this type of fiction.
And not only has the reader a right to expect and demand fair
treatment from an author along the lines tacitly laid down and
according to the principles involved, but an author who uses this
trust for the purpose of tricking his co-solver of a criminal prob-
lem immediately forfeits all claim to the reading public’s consid-
eration.

A word in parting should be said in regard to the primary
theme of the detective novel, for herein lies one of its most im-
portant elements of interest. Crime has always exerted a pro-
found fascination over humanity, and the more serious the crime

70 Willard Huntington Wright

the greater has been that appeal. Murder, therefore, has always
been an absorbing public topic. The psychological reasons for this
morbid and elemental curiosity need not be gone into here; but
the fact itself supplies us with the explanation of why a murder
mystery furnishes a far more fascinating raison d'etre in a detec-
tive novel than does any lesser crime. All the best and most popu-
lar books of this type deal with mysteries involving human life.
Murder would appear to give added zest to the solution of the
problem, and to render the satisfaction of the solution just so
much greater. The reader feels, no doubt, that his efforts have
achieved something worth while — ^something commensurate with
the amount of mental energy which a good detective novel com-
pels him to expend.

The Omnibus ‘of Grime

(1928-29)

By Dorothy L. Sayers

If some enterprising editor or publisher should undertake to as-
semble a collection of the best literary criticism of all types and
topics, and wished to include the finest single piece of analytical
writing about the detective story, it is almost certain that the
choice would go to the Introduction by Dorothy L. Sayers to the
memorable anthology known in her native England as Great
Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror and in America
as the first Omnibus of Crime (London: Gollancz, 1928; New
York: Payson & Clarke, 1929). Authoritative without being didac-
tic, concise but comprehensive. Miss Sayers' critique contains in
its relatively brief compass virtually all that was to be said about
the detective story up to the date of its composition. It is the pres-
ent editor's great regret that space will not permit the inclusion,
also, of Miss Sayers' admirable prefatory remarks to her second
omnibus (England, 1931; America, 1932) in which she forecast
with remarkable accuracy the trend toward the novel of psychol-
ogy and character which has been the outstanding technical de-
velopment in the crime-detective story of the 1930's and 1940's,
,,, As to Miss Sayers' qualifications for her task, it is surely un-
necessary to introduce the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, the au-
thor who has been most frequently called (pace Edmund Wibon
and Raymond Chandler) the most distinguished living exponent
of her art, to an audience of detective story readers.

The art of self-tormenting is an ancient ont, with a long and hon-
ourable literary tradition, Man, not satisfied with the mental con-

72 Dorothy L, Sayers

fusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the
cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy
his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos. The pages of
every magazine and newspaper swarm with cross-words, mathe-
matical tricks, puzzle-pictures, enigmas, acrostics, and detective-
stories, as also with stories of the kind called “'powerful’* (which
means unpleasant), and those which make him afraid to go to bed.
It may be that in them he finds a sort of catharsis or purging of
his fears and self-questionings. These mysteries made only to be
solved, these horrors which he knows to be mere figments of the
creative brain, comfort him by subtly persuading that life is a
mystery which death will solve, and whose horrors will pass away
as a tale that is told. Or it may be merely that his animal faculties
of fear and inquisitiveness demand more exercise than the daily
round affords. Or it may be pure perversity. The fact remains that
if you search the second-hand bookstalls for his cast-off literature,
you will find fewer mystery stories than any other kind of book.
Theology and poetry, philosophy and numismatics, love-stories
and biography, he discards as easily as old razor-blades, but Sher-
lock Holmes and Wilkie Collins are cherished and read and re-
read, till their covers fall off and their pages crumble to frag-
ments.

Both the detective-story proper and the pure tale of horror are
very ancient in origin. All native folk-lore has its ghost tales, while
the first four detective-stories in this book hail respectively from
the Jewish Apocrypha, Herodotus, and the iEneid. But, whereas
the tale of horror has flourished in practically every age and coun-
try, the detective-story has had a spasmodic history, appearing
here and there in faint, tentative sketches and episodes, until it
suddenly burst into magnificent flower in the middle of the last
century.

Early History of Detective Fiction

Between 1840 and 1845 wayward genius of Edgar Allan
Poe (himself a past-master of the honible) produced five tales, in
which the general principles of die detective-story were laid down
for ever. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue** and, with a cer-

The Omnibus of Crime 73

tain repulsive facetiousness, in ‘'Thou Art the Man'* he achieved
the fusion of the two distinct genres and created what we may call
the story of mystery, as distinct from pure detection on the one
hand and pure horror on the other. In this fused genre, the read-
er’s blood is first curdled by some horrible and apparently inex-
plicable murder or portent; the machinery of detection is then
brought in to solve the mystery and punish the murderer. Since
Poe’s time all three branches — detection, mystery, and horror —
have flourished. We have such pleasant little puzzles as Conan
Doyle’s “Case of Identity,” in which there is nothing to shock or
horrify; we have mere fantasies of blood and terror — ^human, as
in Conan Doyle’s “The Case of Lady Sannox,” * or supernatural,
as in Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth,” f most satisfactory
of all, perhaps, we have such fusions as “The Speckled Band,” J
or “The Hammer of God,” § in which the ghostly terror is in-
voked only to be dispelled.

It is rather puzzling that the detective-story should have had
to wait so long to find a serious exponent. Having started so well,
why did it not develop earlier? The Oriental races, with their
keen appreciation of intellectual subtlety, should surely have
evolved it. The germ was there. “Why do you not come to pay
your respects to me?” says .^sop’s lion to the fox. “I beg your
Majesty’s pardon,” says the fox, “but I noticed the track of the
animals that have already come to you; and, while I see many
hoof-marks going in, I see none coming out. Till the animals that
have entered your cave come out again, I prefer to remain in the
open air.” Sherlock Holmes could not have reasoned more lucidly
from the premises.

Cacus the robber, be it noted, was apparently the first criminal
to use the device of forged footprints to mislead the pursuer,
though it is a long development from his primitive methods to the
horses shod with cow-shoes in Conan Doyle’s “Adventure of the
Priory School.” )j Hercules’s methods of investigation, too, were
rather of the rough and ready sort, though the reader will not

♦ Conan Boyle: Round Ikt Red Lamp,
f Marion Crawford: Uncanny Tales,

J Conan Boyle: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,

§ C. K.. Chesterton: The Innocence of Rather Brown*

II Conan Boyle; Return of Sherlock Holmes*

74 Dorothy L, Sayers

fail to observe that this early detective was accorded divine hon-
ours by his grateful clients.

The Jews, with their strongly moral preoccupation, were, as
our two Apocryphal stories show, peculiarly fitted to produce the
roman policier* The Romans, logical and given to law-making,
might have been expected to do something with it, but they did
not. In one of the folk-tales collected by the Grimms, twelve
maidens disguised as men are set to walk across a floor strewn
with peas, in the hope that their shuffling feminine tread will be-
tray them; the maidens are, however, warned, and baffle the de-
tectives by treading firmly. In an Indian folk-tale a similar ruse
is more successful. Here a suitor is disguised as a woman, and
has to be picked out from the women about him by the wise
princess. The princess throws a lemon to each in turn, and the
disguised man is detected by his instinctive action in clapping
his knees together to catch the lemon, whereas the real women
spread their knees to catch it in their skirts. Coming down to later
European literature, we find the Bel-and-the-Dragon motif of the
ashes spread on the floor reproduced in the story of Tristan. Here
the king’s spy spreads flour between Tristan’s bed and that of
Iseult; Tristan defeats the scheme by leaping from one bed to the
other. The eighteenth century also contributed at least one out-
standing example, in the famous detective chapter of Voltaire’s
Zadig.

It may be, as Mr. E. M. Wrong has suggested in a brilliant little
study,f that throughout this early period *'a faulty law of evidence
was to blame, for detectives cannot flourish until the public has
an idea of what constitutes proof, and while a common criminal
procedure is arrest, torture, confession, and death.” One may go
further, and say that, though crime stories might, and did, flour-
ish, the detective-story proper could not do so until public sym-
pathy had veered round to the side of law and order. It will be
noticed that, on the whole, the tendency in early crime-literature

* In *‘Bel and t!ie Dragon** the science of deduction from material clues, in the
pc^ular Scotland Yard manner, is reduced to its simplest expression. “Susanna/*
on thp other hand, may be taken as foreshadowing the Gallic method of eliciting
the truth by the confrontation of witnesses.

f Freface to Tales of Crime and Detection. World*$ Classia. (Oxford University
Freas, tpd.)

The Omnibus of Crime 75

is to admire the cunning and astuteness of the criminal* This must
be so while the law is arbitrary, oppressive, and brutally admin-
istered.

We may note that, even to-day, the full blossoming of the de-
tective-stories is found among the Anglo-Saxon races. It is notori-
ous that an English crowd tends to side with the policeman in a
row. The British legal code, with its tradition of ''sportsmanship”
and "fair play for the criminal” is particularly favourable to the
production of detective fiction, allowing, as it does, sufficient rope
to the quarry to provide a ding-dong chase, rich in up-and-down
incident. In France, also, though the street policeman is less hon-
oured than in England, the detective-force is admirably organised
and greatly looked up to. France has a good output of detective-
stories, though considerably smaller than that of the English-
speaking races. In the Southern States of Europe the law as less
loved and the detective story less frequent. We may not unrea-
sonably trace a connection here.

Some further light is thrown on the question by a remark made
by Herr Lion Feuchtwanger when broadcasting during his visit
to London in 1927. Contrasting the tastes of the English, French,
and German publics, he noted the great attention paid by the
Englishman to the external details of men and things. The Eng-
lishman likes material exactness in the books he reads; the Ger-
man and the Frenchman, in different degrees, care little for it in
comparison with psychological truth. It is hardly surprising, then
that the detective-story, with its insistence on footprints, blood-
stains, dates, times, and places, and its reduction of character-
drawing to bold, flat outline, should appeal far more strongly
to Anglo-Saxon taste than to that of France or Germany.

Taking these two factors together, we begin to see why the
detective-story had to wait for its full development for the estab-
lishment of an effective police organisation in the Anglo-Saxon
countries. This was achieved — in England, at any rate — during the
early part of the nineteenth century, f and was followed about

* e.g. “The Story of Rhampsinitus; Jacob and Esau;** “Reynard the Fox;** “Ballads
of Robin Hood.** etc.

fin a letter to W. Thombnry, dated February t8, 1862, Dickens says: **The Bow
Street Runners ceased out of the land soon after the introduction of the new police.
I remember them wry well. . , . They kept company with thieves and sudi-like,

'j'G Dorothy L. Sayers

the middle of that century by the first outstanding examples of
the detective-story as we know it to-day.’’^

To this argument we may add another. In the nineteenth cen-
tury the vast, unexplored limits of the world began to shrink at
an amazing and unprecedented rate. The electric telegraph cir-
cled the globe; railways brought remote villages into touch with
civilisation; photographs made known to the stay-at-homes the
marvels of foreign landscapes, customs, and animals; science re-
duced seeming miracles to mechanical marvels; popular educa-
tion and improved policing made town and country safer for the
common man than they had ever been. In place of the adventurer
and the knight errant, popular imagination hailed the doctor, the
scientist, and the policeman as saviours and protectors. But if
one could no longer hunt the manticora, one could still hunt the
murderer; if the armed escort had grown less necessary, yet one
still needed the analyst to frustrate the wiles of the poisoner; from
this point of view, the detective steps into his right place as the
protector of the weak — the latest of the popular heroes, the true
successor of Roland and Lancelot.

Etcar Allan Poe: Evolution of the Detective

Before tracing further the history of detective fiction, let us
look a little more closely at those five tales of Poe*s, in which so
much of the future development is anticipated. Probably the first
thing that strikes us is that Poe has struck out at a blow the formal
outline on which a large section of detective fiction has been
built up. In the three Dupin stories, one of which figures in the
present collection, we have the formula of the eccentric and bril-
liant private detective whose doings are chronicled by an admir-

mucli mom than the detective police do. I don’t know what their pay was, but I
have do doubt their principal complements were got under the rose. It was a very
slack institution, and its head-quarters were the Brown Bear, in Bow Street, a public
house of more than doubtful reputation, opposite the police-office.” The first
^peelers” were established in 1829.

* The significance of footprints, and the necessity for scientific care in the checking
of alibis, were understood at quite an early date, though, in the absence of an
cfetive detective police, investigations were usually carried out by private persons
at the instigation of the coroner. A remarkable case, which reads like a Freeman
Wills Crofts novel, was that of R* v. Thornton (j8i8).

The Omnibus of Crime

ing and thick-headed friend. From Dupin and his unnamed
chronicler springs a long and distinguished line: Sherlock Holmes
and his Watson; Martin Hewitt and his Brett; Raffles and his
Bunny (on the criminal side of the business, but of the same
breed); Thorndyke and his various Jardines, Ansteys, and Jer-
vises; Hanaud and his Mr. Ricardo; Poirot and his Captain Hast-
ings; Philo Vance and his Van Dine. It is not surprising that this
formula should have been used so largely, for it is obviously a
very convenient one for the writer. For one thing, the admiring
satellite may utter expressions of eulogy which would be unbe-
coming in the mouth of the author, gaping at his own colossal in-
tellect. Again, the reader, even if he is not, in R. L. Stevenson^s
phrase, “always a man of such vastly greater ingenuity than the
writer,'' is usually a little more ingenious than Watson. He sees
a little further through the brick wall; he pierces, to some extent,
the cloud of mystification with which the detective envelops him-
self. “Aha!” he says to himself, “the average reader is supposed
to see no further than Watson. But the author has not reckoned
with me. I am one too many for him.” He is deluded. It is all a
device of the writer's for flattering him and putting him on good
terms with himself. For though the reader likes to be mystified,
he also likes to say, “I told you so,” and “I spotted that.” And tliis
leads us to the third great advantage of the Holmes-Watson con-
vention: by describing the clues as presented to the dim eyes and
bemused mind of Watson, the author is enabled to preserve a
spurious appearance of frankness, while keeping to himself the
special knowledge on which the interpretation of those clues de-
pends. This is a question of paramount importance, involving the
whole artistic ethic of the detective-story. We shall return to it
later. For the moment, let us consider a few other interesting
types and formulae which make their first appearance in Poe.

The personality of Dupin is eccentric, and for several literary
generations eccentricity was highly fashionable among detective
heroes. Dupin, we are informed, had a habit of living behind
closed shutters, illumined by “a couple of tapers which, strongly
perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays.”
From this stronghold he issued by night, to promenade the streets
and enjoy tlie “infinity of mental excitement” afforded by quiet

78 Dorothy L, Sayers

observation. He was also given to startling his friends by analys-
ing their thought-processes, and he had a rooted contempt for
the methods of the police.

Sherlock Holmes modelled himself to a large extent upon Du-
pin, substituting cocaine for candlelight, with accompaniments
of shag and fiddle-playing. He is a more human and endearing
figure than Dupin, and has earned as his reward the supreme
honour which literature has to bestow — the secular equivalent of
canonisation. He has passed into the language. He also started a
tradition of his own — the hawk-faced tradition, which for many
years dominated detective fiction.

So strong, indeed, was this domination that subsequent notable
eccentrics have displayed their eccentricities chiefly by escaping
from it. “Nothing,” we are told, “could have been less like the
traditional detective than” — so-and-so. He may be elderly and
decrepit, like Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, whose
characteristic habit is the continual knotting of string. Or he
may be round and innocent-looking, like Father Brown or Poirot.
There is Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw,* with his bald, scholarly
forehead; he irrigates his wits with a verbena spray, and carries
about with him an “odically-sterilised” cushion to promote psy-
chic intuition. There is the great Dr. Thorndyke, probably the
handsomest detective in fiction; he is outwardly bonhomous, but
spiritually detached, and his emblem is the green research-case,
filled with miniature microscopes and scientific implements. Max
Carrados has the distinction of being blind; Old Ebbie wears a
rabbit-skin waistcoat; Lord Peter Wimsey (if I may refer to him
without immodesty) indulges in the buying of incunabula and
has a pretty taste in wines and haberdashery. By a final twist of
the tradition, which brings the wheel full circle, there is a strong
modern tendency to produce detectives remarkable for their ordi-
nariness; they may be well-bred walking gentlemen, like A. A.
Milne’s Antony Gillingham, or journalists, like Gaston Leroux’s
Rouletabilie, or they may even be policemen, like Freeman Wills
Crofts’ Inspector French, or the heroes of Mr. A. J. Rees’s sound
and well-planned stories^f

♦ Sax Rohmer: The Dream Detective.

f A. J. Rees: The Shrieking Pit; The Hand in the Dark; (with Jf. R. Watson) The

The Omnibus of Crime 79

There have also been a few women detectives,* but on the
whole, they have not been very successful. In order to justify their
choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to
destroy that quiet enjoyment of the logical which we look for
in our detective reading. Or else they are active and courageous,
and insist on walking into physical danger and hampering the
men engaged on the job. Marriage, also, looms too large in their
view of life; which is not surprising, for they are all young and
beautiful. Why these charming creatures should be able to tackle
abstruse problems at the age of twenty-one or thereabouts, while
the male detectives are usually content to wait till their thirties
or forties before setting up as experts, it is hard to say. Where
do they pick up their worldly knowledge? Not from personal ex-
perience, for they are always immaculate as the driven snow. Pre-
sumably it is all intuition.

Better use has been made of women in books where the detect-
ing is strictly amateur — done, that is, by members of the family or
house-party themselves, and not by a private consultant. Evelyn
Humblethorne f is a detective of this kind, and so is Joan Cow-
per, in The Brooklyn Murders^X But the really brilliant woman
detective has yet to be created. §

While on this subject, we must not forget the curious and in-
teresting development of detective fiction which has produced
the Adventures of Sexton Blake, and other allied cycles. This is
the Holmes tradition, adapted for the reading of the board-school
boy and crossed with the Buffalo Bill adventure type. The books
are written by a syndicate of authors, each one of whom uses a
set of characters of his own invention, grouped about a central

Bampstead Mystery; The Mystery of the Downs, etc. Messrs. Rees and Watson write
of police ajffairs with the accuracy bom of inside knowledge, but commendably avoid
the dullness which is apt to result from a too-faithful description of correct ofiBcial
procedure.

♦ e.g. Anna Katharine Green: The Golden Slipper; Baroness Orczy: Lady Molly of
Scotland Yard; G, R. Sims; Dorcas Dene; Valentine: The Adjusters; Richard Marsh:
Judith Lee; Arthur B. Reeve: Constance Dunlap; etc.
f Lord Gorell: In the NtghL
I G. B. H. Sc M. Cole.

§ Wilkie Collins—who was curiously fascinated by the “strong-minded** woman
— ^made two attempts at the woman detective in No Name and The Law and the
Lady. The spirit of the time was, however, too powerful to allow these attempts
to be altogctiher sutxessful.

8o Dorothy L. Sayers

and traditional group consisting of Sexton Blake and his boy as-
sistant, Tinker, their comic landlady Mrs. Bardell, and their bull-
dog Pedro. As might be expected, the quality of the writing and
the detective methods employed vary considerably from one au-
thor to another. The best specimens display extreme ingenuity,
and an immense vigour and fertility in plot and incident. Never-
theless, the central types are pretty consistently preserved through-
out the series. Blake and Tinker are less intuitive than Holmes,
from whom however, they are directly descended, as their ad-
dress in Baker Street shows. They are more careless and reckless
in their methods; more given to displays of personal heroism and
pugilism; more simple and human in their emotions. The really
interesting point about them is that they present the nearest mod-
ern approach to a national folk-lore, conceived as the centre for
a cycle of loosely connected romances in the Arthurian manner.
Their significance in popular literature and education would
richly repay scientific investigation.

Edgar Allan Poe: Evolution of the Plot

As regards plot also, Poe laid down a number of sound keels
for the use of later adventurers. Putting aside his instructive ex-
cursion into the psychology of detection — instructive, because we
can trace their influence in so many of Poe's successors down to
the present day — ^putting these aside, and discounting that at-
mosphere of creepiness which Poe so successfully diffused about
nearly all he wrote, we shall probably find that to us, sophisticated
and trained on an intensive study of detective fiction, his plots
are thin to transparency. But in Poe's day they represented a new
technique. As a matter of fact, it is doubtful whether there are
more than half a dozen deceptions in the mystery-monger’s bag
of tricks, and we shall find that Poe has got most of them, at any
rate in embryo.

Take, first, the three Dupin stories. In “The Murders in the
Rue Morgue,'* an old woman and her daughter are found horribly
murdered in an (apparently) hermetically sealed room. An inno-
cent person is arrested by the police. Dupin proves that the police
have failed to discover one mode of entrance to the room, and

The Omnibus of Crime 8 i

deduces from a number of observations that the “murder” was
committed by a huge ape. Here is, then, a combination of three
typical motifs: the wrongly suspected man, to whom all the super-
ficial evidence (motive, access, etc.) points; the hermetically sealed
death-chamber (still a favourite central theme); finally, the 5oZu-
tion by the unexpected means. In addition, we have Dupin draw-
ing deductions, which the police have overlooked, from the evi-
dence of witnesses (superiority in inference), and discovering clues
which the police have not thought of looking for owing to ob-
session by an idee fixe (superiority in observation based on in-
ference). In this story also are enunciated for the first time those
two great aphorisms of detective science: first, that when you have
eliminated all the impossibilities, then, whatever remains, how-
ever improbable^ must be the truth; and, secondly, that the more
outre a case may appear, the easier it is to solve. Indeed, take it
all round, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” constitutes in itself
almost a complete manual of detective theory and practice.

In “The Purloined Letter,” we have one of those stolen docu-
ments on whose recovery hangs the peace of mind of a distin-
guished personage. It is not, indeed, one of the sort whose publi-
cation would spread consternation among the Chancelleries of
Europe, but it is important enough. The police suspect a certain
minister of taking it. They ransack every comer of his house, in
vain. Dupin, arguing from his knowledge of the minister’s char-
acter, decides that subtlety must be met by subtlety. He calls on
the minister and discovers the letter, turned inside out and stuck
in a letter-rack in full view of the casual observer.

Here we have, besides the reiteration, in inverted form,* of
aphorism No. 2 (above), the method of psychological deduction
and the solution by the formula %of the most obvious place. This

♦ ”The business is very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage
it sufficiently well oumelves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear of it
because it is so excessively add"

"^Simple and odd,** said Dupin.

**Why, yes; and not exactly that cither. The fact is, we have all been a good deal
puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether.**

** Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault/* said
Dupin.

The psychology of the matter is fully discussed in Poe*s characteristic manner a
few pages further on.

82 Dorothy L. Sayers

trick is the forerunner of the diamond concealed in the tumbler
of water, the man murdered in the midst of a battle, Chesterton's
“Invisible Man” (the postman, so familiar a figure that his pres-
ence goes unnoticed) * and a whole line of similar ingenuities.

The third Dupin story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” has
fewer imitators, but is the most interesting of all to the connois-
seur. It consists entirely of a series of newspaper cuttings relative
to the disappearance and murder of a shopgirl, with Dupin's com-
ments thereon. The story contains no solution of the problem,
and, indeed, no formal ending — ^and that for a very good reason.
The disappearance was a genuine one, its actual heroine being
one Mary Cecilia Rogers, and the actual place New York. The
newspaper cuttings, were also, mutatis mutandis^ genuine. The
paper which published Poe's article dared not publish his con-
clusion. Later on it was claimed that his argument was, in sub-
stance, correct; and though this claim has, I believe, been chal-
lenged of late years, Poe may, nevertheless, be ranked among the
small band of mystery-writers who have put their skill in deduc-
tion to the acid test of a problem which they had not in the first
place invented.f

Of the other Poe stories, one, “Thou Art the Man,” is very
slight in theme and unpleasantly flippant in treatment. A man
is murdered; a hearty person, named, with guileless cunning,
Goodfellow, is very energetic in fixing the crime on a certain per-
son. The narrator of the story makes a repulsive kind of Jack-in-
the-box out of the victim's corpse, and extorts a confession of guilt
from — Goodfellowl Of course. Nevertheless, we have here two
more leading motifs that have done overtime since Poe’s day: the
trail of false clues laid by the real murderer,J and the solution
by way of the most unlikely person.

The fifth story is “The Gold Bug.” In this a man finds a cipher
which leads him to the discovery of a hidden treasure. The cipher
is of the very simple one-sign-one-letter type, and its solution, of
themark-where-the-shadow-falls-take-three-paces-to-the-east-and-dig

♦ G. K.. Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown.

f Sir Arthur Conan Boyle’s successful efforts on behalf of George Edalji and Oscar
Slater deserve special mention.

J See also *’Thc Story of Susanm.*’

The Omnibus of Crime 83

variety. In technique this story is the exact opposite of '*Marie
Roget”; the narrator is astonished by the antics of his detective
friend, and is kept in entire ignorance of what he is about until
after the discovery of the treasure; only then is the cipher for the
first time either mentioned or explained. Some people think that
“The Gold Bug” is Poe’s finest mystery-story.

Now, with “The Gold Bug” at the one extreme and “Marie
Roget” at the other, and the other three stories occupying in-
termediate places, Poe stands at the parting of the ways for detec-
tive fiction. From him go the two great lines of development —
the Romantic and the Classic, or, to use terms less abraded by
ill-usage, the purely Sensational and the purely Intellectual. In
the former, thrill is piled on thrill and mystification on mystifica-
tion; the reader is led on from bewilderment to bewilderment,
till everything is explained in a lump in the last chapter. This
school is strong in dramatic incident and atmosphere; its weakness
is a tendency to confusion and a dropping of links — its explana-
tions do not always explain; it is never dull, but it is sometimes
nonsense. In the other — the purely Intellectual type — the action
mostly takes place in the first chapter or so; the detective then
follows up quietly from clue to clue till the problem is solved,
the reader accompanying the great man in his search and being
allowed to try his own teeth on the material provided. The
strength of this school is its analytical ingenuity; its weakness is
its liability to dullness and pomposity, its mouthing over the in-
finitely little, and its lack of movement and emotion.

Intellectual and Sensational Lines of Development

The purely Sensational thriller is not particularly rare^ — ^we
may find plenty of examples in the work of William Le Queux,
Edgar Wallace, and others. The purely Intellectual is lare in-
deed; few writers have consistently followed the “Marie Rog^t”
formula of simply spreading the whole evidence before the reader
and leaving him to deduce the detective’s conclusion from it if
he can.

M. P. Shiel, indeed, did so in his trilogy, Prince Zaleski whose
curious and elaborate beauty recaptures in every arabesque sen-

84 Dorothy L. Sayers

tence the very accent of Edgar Allan Poe. Prince Zaleski, ‘Victim
of a too importunate, too unfortunate Love, which the fulgor of
the throne itself could not abash,” sits apart in his ruined tower
in “the semi-darkness of the very faint greenish lustre radiated
from an open censer-like lampas in the centre of the domed en»
causted roof,” surrounded by Flemish sepulchral brasses, runic
tablets, miniature paintings, winged bulls, Tamil scriptures on
lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly
gemmed, Brahmin gods, and Egyptian mummies, and lulled by
“the low, liquid tinkling of an invisible musical-box.” Like Sher-
lock Holmes, he indulges in a drug — “the narcotic cannabis
sativa: the base of the bhang of the Mohammedans.” A friend
brings to him the detective problems of the outside world, which
he proceeds to solve from the data given and (except in the final
story) without stirring from his couch. He adorns his solutions
with philosophical discourses on the social progress of mankind,
all delivered with the same melancholy grace and remote intel-
lectual disdain. The reasoning is subtle and lucid, but the crimes
themselves are fantastic and incredible — fault which these tales
have in common with those of G. K. Chesterton.

Another writer who uses the “Marie Roget” formula is Baroness
Orczy. Her Old Man in the Corner series is constructed precisely
on those lines, and I have seen a French edition in which, when
the expository part of the story is done, the reader is exhorted to:
“Pause a moment and see if you can arrive at the explanation
yourself, before you read the Old Man’s solution.” This pure puz-
zle is a formula which obviously has its limitations. Nearest to
this among modern writers comes Freeman Wills Crofts, whose
painstaking sleuths always “play fair” and display their clues to
the reader as soon as they have picked them up. The intellectually
minded reader can hardly demand more than this. The aim of
the writer of this type of detective-story is to make the reader
say at the end, neither: “Oh well, I knew it must be that all
along,” nor yet: “Dash it all! I couldn*t be expected to guess
that”; but: “Oh, of course! What a fool I was not to see it! Right
under my nose all the time!” Precious tribute! How often striven
for! How rarely earned!

On the whole, however, the tendency is for the modern edu-

The Omnibus of Crime 85

cated public to demand fair play from the writer, and for the
Sensational and Intellectual branches of the story to move further
apart.

Before going further with this important question, we must
look back once more to the middle of the last century, and see
what development took place to bridge the gap between Dupin
and Sherlock Holmes.

Poe, like a restless child, played with his new toy for a little
while, and then, for some reason, wearied of it. He turned his
attention to other things, and his formula lay neglected for close
on forty years. Meanwhile a somewhat different type of detective-
story was developing independently in Europe. In 1848 the elder
Dumas, always ready to try his hand at any novel and ingenious
thing, suddenly inserted into the romantic body of the Vicomte
de Bragelofine a passage of pure scientific deduction. This passage
is quite unlike anything else in the Musketeer cycle, and looks
like the direct outcome of Dumas* keen interest in actual crime,*

But there is another literary influence which, though the fact
is not generally recognised, must have been powerfully exerted
at this date upon writers of mystery fiction. Between 1820 and
1850 the novels of Fenimore Cooper began to enjoy their huge
popularity, and were not only widely read in America and Eng-
land, but translated into most European languages. In The Path-
finder ^ The DeerslayeVj The Last of the Mohicans, and the rest
of the series, Cooper revealed to the delighted youth of two hemi-
spheres the Red Indian’s patient skill in tracking his quarry by
footprints, in interrogating a broken twig, a mossy trunk, a fallen
leaf. The imagination of childhood was fired; every boy wanted
to be an Uncas or a Chingachgook. Novelists, not content with
following and imitating Cooper on his own ground, discovered a
better way, by transferring the romance of the woodland tracker
to the surroundings of their native country. In the ’sixties the
generation who had read Fenimore Cooper in boyhood turned, as
novelists and readers, to tracing the spoor of the criminal upon
their own native heath. The enthusiasm for Cooper combined
magnificently with that absorbing interest in crime and detec-
tion which better methods* of communication and an improved

• He pablisised a great collection of famous crimes.

86 Dorothy L. Sayers

police system had made possible. While, in France, Gaboriau and
Fortune du Boisgobey concentrated upon the police novel pure
and simple, English writers, still permeated by the terror and
mystery of the romantic movement, and influenced by the “New-
gate novel” of Bulwer and Ainsworth, perfected a more varied
and imaginative genre, in which the ingenuity of the detective
problem allied itself with the sombre terrors of the weird and
supernatural.

The Pre-Doyle Period

Of the host of writers who attempted this form of fiction in the
'sixties and 'seventies, three may be picked out for special men-
tion.

That voluminous writer, Mrs. Henry Wood, represents, on the
whole, the melodramatic and adventurous aevelopment of the
crime-story as distinct from the detective problem proper.
Through East Lynne^ crude and sentimental as it is, she exercised
an enormous influence on the rank and file of sensational novel-
ists, and at her best, she is a most admirable spinner of plots.
Whether her problem concerns a missing will, a vanished heir, a
murder, or a family curse, the story spins along without flagging,
and, though she is a little too fond of calling in Providence to
cut the knot of intrigue with the sword of coincidence, the mys-
tery is fully and properly unravelled, in a workmanlike manner
and without any loose ends. She makes frequent use of super-
natural thrills. Sometimes these are explained away: a “mur-
dered” person is seen haunting the local churchyard, and turns
out never to have been killed at all. Sometimes the supernatural
remains supernatural, as, for instance, the coffin-shaped appear-
ance in The Shadow of Ashlydyat, Her morality is perhaps a little
oppressive, but she is by no means without humour, and at times
can produce a shrewd piece of characterisation.

Melodramatic, but a writer of real literary attainment, and
gifted with a sombre power which has seldom been equalled in
painting the ghastly and the macabre, is Sheridan Le Fanu. Like
Poe, he has the gift of investing the most mechanical of plots with
an atmosphere of almost unbearable horror. Take, for example,

The Omnibus of Crime 87

that scene in Wylder^s Hand where the aged Uncle Lome appears
— phantom or madman? we are not certain which — to confront
the villainous Lake in the tapestried room.

“ *Mark Wylder is in evil plight/ said he.

‘‘ ‘Is he?* said Lake with a sly scoff, though he seemed to me a good
deal scared. ‘We hear no complaints, however, and fancy he must be
tolerably comfortable notwithstanding.*

“ ‘You know where he is,* said Uncle Lome.

“ ‘Aye, in Italy; everyone knows that,* answered Lake.

“ ‘In Italy,’ said the old man reflectively, as if trying to gather up
his ideas, ‘Italy. ... He has had a great tour to make. It is nearly
accomplished now; when it is done, he will be like me, humano
major. He has seen the places which you are yet to see,*

“ ‘Nothing I should like better; particularly Italy,* said Lake.

“ ‘Yes,* said Uncle Lome, lifting up slowly a different finger at
each name in his catalogue. ‘First, Lucus Mortis; then Terra Tene-
brosa; next, Tartarus; after that Terra Oblivionis; then Herebus;
then Barathrum; then Gehenna, and then Stagnum Ignis.*

“ ‘Of course,’ acquiesced Lake, with an ugly sneer. . . .

“ ‘Don’t be frightened — but he’s alive; I think they’ll make him
mad. It is a frightful plight. Two angels buried him alive in Val-
lombrosa by night; I saw it, standing among the lotus and hem-
locks. A negro came to me, a black clergyman with white eyes, and
remained beside me; and the angels imprisoned Mark; they put
him on duty forty days and forty nights, with his ear to the river
listening for voices; and when it was over we blessed them; and the
clergyman walked with me a long while, to-and-fro, to-and-fro upon
the earth, telling me the wonders of the abyss.*

“ ‘And is it from the abyss, sir, he writes his letters?” enquired
the Town Clerk, with a wink at Lake.

“ ‘Yes, yes, very diligent; it behoves him; and his hair is always
standing straight on his head for fear. But he’ll be sent up again,
at last, a thousand, a hundred, ten and one, black marble steps, and
then it will be the other one’s turn. So it was prophesied by the
black magician.* ”

This chapter leads immediately to those in which Larkin, the
crooked attorney, discovers, by means of a little sound detective
work of a purely practical sort, that Mark Wylder’s letters have
indeed been written *'from the abyss/* Mark Wylder has, in fact.

88 Dorothy L. Sayers

been murdered, and the letters are forgeries sent abroad to be
despatched by Lake’s confederate from various towns in Italy.
From this point we gradually learn to expect the ghastly moment
when he is “sent up again at last” from the grave, in the Black-
berry Dell at Gylingden,

“In the meantime the dogs continued their unaccountable yell-
ing close by.

“ ‘What the devil’s that?’ said Wealden.

“Something like a stunted, blackened branch was sticking out
of the peat, ending in a set of short, thickish twigs. This is what it
seemed. The dogs were barking at it. It was, really, a human hand
and arm. . .

In this book the detection is done by private persons, and the
local police are only brought in at the end to secure the criminal.
This is also the case in that extremely interesting book Check-
mate (1870), in which the plot actually turns upon the complete
alteration of the criminal's appearance by a miracle of plastic
surgery. It seems amazing that more use has not been made of this
device in post-war days, now that the reconstruction of faces has
become comparatively common and, with the perfecting of asep-
tic surgery, infinitely easier than in Le Fanu’s day. I can only call
to mind two recent examples of this kind: one, Mr. Hopkins
Moorhouse’s Gauntlet of Alceste; the other, a short story called
“The Losing of Jasper Virel,” by Beckles Willson.* In both stories
the alterations include the tattooing of the criminal's eyes from
blue to brown.

For sheer grimness and power, there is little in the literature
of horror to compare with the trepanning scene in Le Fanu’s The
House by the Churchyard. Nobody who has ever read it could
possibly forget that sick chamber, with the stricken man sunk in
his deathly stupor; the terrified wife; the local doctor, kindly and
absurd — ^and then the pealing of the bell, and the entry of the
brilliant, brutal Dillon “in dingy splendours and a great draggled
wig, with a gold-headed cane in his bony hand . . . diffusing a
reek of whisky-punch, and with a case of instruments under his
arm,” to perform the operation. The whole scene is magnificently

Strmd Magazine, July 1909.

The Omnibus of Crime 89

written, with the surgeon’s muttered technicalities heard through
the door, the footsteps — then the silence while the trepanning is
proceeding, and the wounded Sturk’s voice, which no one ever
thought to hear again, raised as if from the grave to denounce
his murderer. That chapter in itself would entitle Le Fanu to be
called a master of mystery and horror.

Most important of all during this period we have Wilkie Col-
lins. An extremely uneven writer, Collins is less appreciated to-
day than his merits and influence deserve.* He will not bear
comparison with Le Fanu in his treatment of the weird, though
he was earnestly ambitious to succeed in this line. His style was
too dry and inelastic, his mind too legal. Consider the famous
dream in Armadale, divided into seventeen separate sections, each
elaborately and successively fulfilled in laborious detail! In the
curious semi-supernatural rhythm of The Woman in White he
came nearer to genuine achievement, but, on the whole, his eerie-
ness is wire-drawn and unconvincing. But he greatly excels Le
Fanu in humour, in the cunning of his rogues f in character-
drawdng, and especially in the architecture of his plots. Taking
everything into consideration, The Moonstone is probably the
very finest detective story ever written. By comparison with its
wide scope, its dove-tailed completeness and the marvellous variety
and soundness of its characterisation, modern mystery fiction looks
thin and mechanical. Nothing human is perfect, but The Moon-
stone comes about as near perfection as anything of its kind can
be.

In The Moonstone Collins used the convention of telling the
story in a series of narratives from the pens of the various actors
concerned. Modern realism — often too closely wedded to exter-
nals — is prejudiced against this device. It is true that, for example,
Betteredge*s narrative is not at all the kind of thing that a butler

•In the British Museum catalogue only two critical studies of this celebrated
English mystery-monger are listed: one is by an American, the other by a German,

f Collins made peculiarly his own the art of plot and counter-plot. Thus we
have the magnificent duels of Marion Halcombe and Count Eosco in The Woman
in White: Captain Wragge and Mrs. Lecount in No Name; the Pedgifts and
Mim Gwilt in Armadale, Move answera to move as though on a chessboard (but
very much more briskly), until the villain is manoeuvred into the corner where a
cunningly contrived legal checkmate has been quietly awaiting him from the be-
ginning of the game.

go Dorothy L. Sayers

would be likely to write; nevertheless, it has an ideal truth — it is
the kind of thing that Betteredge might think and feel, even if
he could not write it* And, granted this convention of the various
narratives, how admirably the characters are drawni The pathetic
figure of Rosanna Spearman, with her deformity and her warped
devotion, is beautifully handled, with a freedom from sentimen-
tality which is very remarkable. In Rachel Verinder, Collins has
achieved one of the novelist s hardest tasks; he has depicted a girl
who is virtuous, a gentlewoman, and really interesting, and that
without the slightest exaggeration or deviation from naturalness
and probability. From his preface to the book it is clear that he
took especial pains with this character, and his success was so
great as almost to defeat itself. Rachel is so little spectacular that
we fail to realise what a singularly fine and truthful piece of work
she is.

The detective part of the story is well worth attention. The fig-
ure of Sergeant Cuff is drawn with a restraint and sobriety which
makes him seem a little colourless beside Holmes and Thorndyke
and Carrados, but he is a very living figure. One can believe that
he made a success of his rose-growing when he retired; he genu-
inely loved roses, whereas one can never feel that the great Sher-
lock possessed quite the right feeling for his bees. Being an offi-
cial detective, Sergeant Cuff is bound by the etiquette of his call-
ing. He is never really given a free hand with Rachel, and the
conclusion he comes to is a wrong one. But he puts in a good
piece of detective work in the matter of Rosanna and the stained
nightgown; and the scenes in which his shrewdness and knowl-
edge of human nature are contrasted with the blundering stupid-
ity of Superintendent Seagrave read like an essay in the manner
of Poe.

It is, of course, a fact that the Dupin stories had been published
fifteen years or so when The Moonstone appeared. But there is
no need to seek in them for the original of Sergeant Cuff. He had
his prototype in real life, and the whole nightgown incident was
modelled, with some modifications, upon a famous case of the
early 'sixties— the murder of little William Kent by his sixteen-
year-old sister, Constance. Those who are interested in origins
will find an excellent account of the '‘Road murder," as it is

The Omnibus of Crime §i

called, in Miss Tennyson Jesse’s Murder and its Motives^, or in
Atlay’s Famous Trials of the Nineteenth Century ^ and may com-
pare the methods of Sergeant Cuff with those of the real Detec-
tive Whicher.

Wilkie Collins himself claimed that nearly all his plots were
founded on fact; indeed, this was his invariable answer when the
charge of improbability was preferred against him.

1 wish,’ he cries angrily to a friend, ‘before people make such
assertions, they would think what they are writing or talking about.

I know of very few instances in which fiction exceeds the proba-
bility of reality. Ill tell you where I got many of my plots from. I
was in Paris, wandering about the streets with Charles Dickens,
amusing ourselves by looking into the shops. We came to an old
book stall — ^half-shop and half-store — and I found some dilapidated
volumes and records of French crime — a sort of French Newgate
Calendar. I said to Dickens “Here is a prize!” So it turned out to
be. In them I found some of my best plots.’ ” *

Not that Collins was altogether disingenuous in his claim never
to have o’erstepped the modesty of nature. While each one of his
astonishing contrivances and coincidences might, taken separately,
find its parallel in real life, it remains true that in cramming a
whole series of such improbabilities into the course of a single
story he does frequently end by staggering all belief. But even so,
he was a master craftsman, whom many modern mystery-mongers
might imitate to their profit. He never wastes an incident; he
never leaves a loose end; no incident, however trivial on the one
hand or sensational on the other, is ever introduced for the mere
sake of amusement or sensation. Take, for example, the great
“sensation-scene” in No Name, where for half an hour Magdalen
sits, with the bottle of laudanum in her hand, counting the pass-
ing ships, “If, in that time, an even number passed her — the sign
given should be a sign to live. If the uneven number prevailed,
the end should be — death.” Here, you would say, is pure sensa-
tionalism; it is a situation invented deliberately to wring tears
and anguish from the heart of the reader. But you would be
wrong. That bottle of laudanum is brought in because it will

• Wybert Reeve: ‘'RmjUectiom of Wilkie CoUias/’ Chambers* Journal, Vol IX.,
p. 458.

92 Dorothy L. Sayers

be wanted again, later on. In the next section of the story it is
found in Magdalen’s dressing-case, and this discovery, by lead-
ing her husband to suppose that she means to murder him, finally
induces him to cut her out of his will, and so becomes one of
the most important factors in the plot.

In The Moonstone, which of all his books comes nearest to
being a detective-story in the modern sense, Collins uses with
great effect the formula of the most unlikely person * and the
unexpected means in conjunction. Opium is the means in this
case — a drug with whose effects we are tolerably familiar to-day,
but which in Collins’s time was still something of an unknown
quantity, de Quincey notwithstanding. In the opium of The
Moonstone and the plastic surgery of Checkmate we have the dis-
tinguished forebears of a long succession of medical and scientific
mysteries which stretches down to the present day.

During the ’seventies and early ’eighties the long novel of mar-
vel and mystery held the field, slowly unrolling its labyrinthine
complexity through its three ample volumes crammed with in-
cident and leisurely drawn characters.f

Sherlock Holmes and His Influence

In 1887 A Study in Scarlet was flung like a bombshell into the
field of detective fiction, to be followed within a few short and
brilliant years by the marvellous series of Sherlock Holmes short
stories. The effect was electric. Conan Doyle took up the Poe
formula and galvanised it into life and popularity. He cut out
the elaborate psychological introductions, or restated them in

* Franklin Blake — the actual, though unconscious thief. By an ingenious turn,
this discovery does not end the story. The diamond is still missing, and a further
chase leads to the really guilty party (Godfrey Ablewhite). The character of
this gentleman is enough to betray his villainy to the modern reader, though it
may have seemed less repulsive to the readers in the 'sixties. His motive, however,
is made less obvious, although it quite honourably and fairly hinted at for the
observant reader to guess.

f We must not leave this period without mentioning the stories of Anna Katharine
Green, of which the long series begins with The Leavenworth Case in 1883, and
extends right down to the present day. They are genuine detective-stories, often of
considerable ingenuity, but marred by an unaitical sentimentality of style and
treatment which makes them difficult reading for the modem student. They are,
however, important by their volume and by their influence on other American
writers.

The Omnibus of Crime 93

crisp dialogue. He brought into prominence what Poe had only
lightly touched upon — ^the deduction of staggering conclusions
from trifling indications in the Dumas-Cooper-Gaboriau manner.
He was sparkling, surprising, and short. It was the triumph of
the epigram.

A comparison of the Sherlock Holmes tales with the Dupin
tales shows clearly how much Doyle owed to Poe, and, at the same
time, how greatly he modified Poe’s style and formula. Read,
for instance, the opening pages of *‘The Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” which introduce Dupin, and compare them with the
first chapter of A Study in Scarlet, Or merely set side by side the
two passages which follow and contrast the relations between
Dupin and his chronicler on the one hand, and between Holmes
and Watson on the other:

'‘I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and,
above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervour,
and the vivid freshness of his imagination. Seeking in Paris the ob-
jects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to
me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to
him. It was at length' arranged that we should live together . . .
and as my worldly circumstances were somewhat less embarrassed
than his own, I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and
furnishing in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our
common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion ... in a re-
tired and desolate portion of the Faubourg Saint Germain . . .

It was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?)
to be enamoured of the Night for her own sake; and into this
bizarrerie^ as into all his others, I quietly fell, giving myself up to
his wild whims with a perfect abandon.’’ *

* *An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend
Sherlock Holmes was that, though in his methods of thought he
was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and aiibough
also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the
less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever
drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least con-
ventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in
Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of dis-

*‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.*

94 Dorothy L. Sayers

position, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man.
But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his
cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe-end o£ a Persian
slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-
knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin
to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol-
practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when
Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair,
with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed
to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-
pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the ap-
pearance of our room was improved by it.” *

See how the sturdy independence of Watson adds salt and sa-
vour to the eccentricities of Holmes, and how flavourless beside it
is the hero-worshipping self-abnegation of Dupin’s friend. See,
too, how the concrete details of daily life in Baker Street lift the
story out of the fantastic and give it a solid reality. The Baker
Street menage has just that touch of humorous commonplace
which appeals to British readers.

Another pair of parallel passages will be found in “The Pur-
loined Letter” and “The Naval Treaty,” They show the two de-
tectives in dramatic mood, surprising their friends by their solu-
tion of the mystery. In “The Adventure of the Priory School,”
also, a similar situation occurs, though Holmes is here shown in
a grimmer vein, rebuking wickedness in high places.

Compare, also, the conversational styles of Holmes and Dupin,
and the reasons for Holmes’s popularity become clearer than ever.
Holmes has enriched English literature with more than one mem-
orable aphorism and turn of speech.

“ Ton know my methods, Watson.'

“ *A long shot, Watson- — a very long shot/

“ * — a little monograph on the hundred-and-fourteen varieties of
tobacco-ash/

“ These are deep waters, Watson.'

“ ‘Excellent!' cried Mr. Acton. — ^‘But very superficial,' said
Holmes,

“ ‘Excellentr I cried. — ‘Elementary,* said he.

‘The Mii^ave Ititiial.’

The Omnibus of Crime * 95

It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be
able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental
and which vital/

“ 'You mentioned your name as if I should recognise it, but be-
yond the obvious fact that you are a bachelor^ a solicitor, a Free-
mason and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you/

“ 'Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained
to you/ ”

Nor must we forget that delightful form of riposto which
Father Ronald Knox has wittily christened the "Sherlockismus**:

“ 1 would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog
in the night-time/

" 'The dog did nothing in the night-time/

“ 'That was the curious incident/

So, with Sherlock Holmes, the ball — the original nucleus de-
posited by Edgar Allan Poe nearly forty years earlier — was at last
set rolling. As it went, it swelled into a vast mass — it set oflE others
— it became a spate — a torrent — ^an avalanche of mystery fiction.
It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced
to-day. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from
the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspira-
cies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poison-
ers, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives,
until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting rid-
dles for the other half to solve.

The Scientific Detective

The boom began in the ’nineties, when the detective short
story, till then rather neglected, strode suddenly to the front and
made the pace rapidly under the aegis of Sherlock Holmes, Of
particular interest is the long series which appeared under vari-
ous titles from the pens of L, T. Meade and her collaborators.
These struck out a line-— not new, indeed, for, as we have seen,
it is as old as Collins and Le Fanu, but important because it was
paving the way for great developments in a scientific age — the
medical mystery story. Mrs, Meade opened up this fruitful vein

96 Dorothy L, Sayers

with Stories from the Diary of a Doctor in 1893,* and pursued
it in various magazines almost without a break to The Sorceress
of the Strand in 1902. These tales range from mere records of
queer cases to genuine detective-stories in which the solution has
a scientific or medical foundation. During this long collaboration,
the authors deal with such subjects as hypnotism, catalepsy (so-
called — then a favourite disease among fiction-writers), somnam-
bulism, lunacy, murder by the use of X-rays and hydrocyanic acid
gas, and a variety of other medical and scientific discoveries and
inventions.

More definitely in the Holmes tradition is the sound and ex-
cellent work of Arthur Morrison in the ‘‘Martin Hewitt’' books.
Various authors such as John Oxenham and Manville Fenn also
tried their hands at the detective-story, before turning to special-
ise in other work. We get also many lively tales of adventure and
roguery, with a strong thread of detective interest, as, for example,
the “African Millionaire” series by Grant Allen.

Now in the great roar and rush of enthusiasm which greeted
Sherlock Holmes, the detective-story became swept away on a
single current of development. We observed, in discussing the
Poe tales, that there were three types of story — the Intellectual
(“Marie Roget”), the Sensational (“The Gold Bug”), and the
Mixed (“Murders in the Rue Morgue”). “Sherlock Holmes” tales,
as a rule, are of the mixed type. Holmes — I regret to say it — does
not always play fair with the reader. He “picks up,” or “pounces
upon,” a “minute object,” and draws a brilliant deduction from
it, but the reader, however brilliant, cannot himself anticipate
that deduction because he is not told what the “small object” is.
It is Watson’s fault, of course — Holmes, indeed, remonstrated
with him on at least one occasion about his unscientific methods
of narration.

An outstanding master of this “surprise” method is Melville
Davisson Post. His tales are so admirably written, and his ideas
so ingenious, that we fail at first reading to realise how strictly

* la collaboration with *Xlifford Halifax.”

fin collaboration with Robert Eustace, In these stories the scientific basis was
provided by Robert Eustace, and the actual writing done, for the most part, by
L. T. Meade.

The Omnibus of Crime 97

sensational they are in their method. Take, for instance, '‘An Act
of God’' from Uncle Abner (1911). In this tale, Uncle Abner
uses the phonetic mis-spelling in a letter supposed to be written
by a deaf mute to prove that the letter was not, in fact, written
by him. If the text of the letter were placed before the reader,
and he were given a chance to make his deduction for himself, the
tale would be a true detective-story of the Intellectual type; but
the writer keeps this clue to himself, and springs the detective’s
conclusions upon us like a bolt from the blue.

The Modern “Fair-play” Method

For many years, the newness of the genre and the immense
prestige of Holmes blinded readers’ eyes to these feats of leger-
demain. Gradually, however, as the bedazzlement wore off, the
public became more and more exacting. The uncritical are still
catered for by the “thriller,” in which nothing is explained, but
connoisseurs have come, more and more, to call for a story which
puts them on an equal footing with the detective himself, as re-
gards all clues and discoveries.*^

Seeing that the demand for equal opportunities is coupled to-
day with an insistence on strict technical accuracy in the smallest
details of the story, it is obvious that the job of writing detective-
stories is by no means growing easier. The reader must be given
every clue — but he must not be told, surely, all the detective’s
deductions, lest he should see the solution too far ahead. Worse
stilL supposing, even without the detective’s help, he interprets
all the clues accurately on his own account, what becomes of the
surprise? How can we at the same time show the reader every-
thing and yet legitimately obfuscate him as to its meaning?

Various devices are used to get over the difficulty. Frequently
the detective, while apparently displaying his clues openly, will
keep up his sleeve some bit of special knowledge which the reader
does not possess. Thus, Thomdyke can cheerfully show you all his

* Yet even to-day the ntaughty tradition persists. In The Crime at Bmna*s Pool,
lor instance (19*7), V. L. Wbitechurch sins notably, twice over, In this respect,
in the conrsc ol an otherwise excellent tale. But such crimes bring their own
punishment, for the modem reader is quick to detect and resent unfairness, and a
stem, though kindly letter of rebuke is presently d^patched to the erring author!

gS Dorothy L. Sayers

finds. You will be none the wiser, unless you happen to have an
intimate acquaintance with the fauna of local ponds; the effect
of belladonna on rabbits; the physical and chemical properties of
blood; optics; tropical diseases; metallurgy; hieroglyphics, and a
few other trifles. Another method of misleading is to tell the
reader what the detective has observed and deduced — ^but to make
the observations and deductions turn out to be incorrect, thus
leading up to a carefully manufactured surprise-packet in the
last chapter.*

Some writers, like Mrs. Agatha Christie, still cling to the Wat-
son formula. The story is told through the mouth, or at least
through the eyes, of a Watson.f Others, like A. A. Milne in his
Red House Mystery ^ adopt a mixed method. Mr. Milne begins by
telling his tale from the position of a detached spectator; later
on, we find that he has shifted round, and is telling it through
the personality of Bill Beverley (a simple-minded but not unin-
telligent Watson); at another moment we find ourselves actually
looking out through the eyes of Antony Gillingham, the detec-
tive himself.

Importance of the Viewpoint

The skill of a modern detective novelist is largely shown by
the play he makes with these various viewpoints.^ Let us see how
it is done in an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre. We will
examine for the purpose a page of Mr. E. C. Bentley’s Trent's Last
Case. Viewpoint No, i is what we may call the Watson viewpoint;
the detective’s external actions only are seen by the reader. View-
point No. « is the middle viewpoint; we see what the detective

♦ E. C. Bmtley: Trents Last Case; Lord Gordl: In the Night; George Pkydell:
The Ware Case; etc,

f An exceptional handling of the Watson theme is found in Agatha Christie's
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is a tour de force. Some critics, as, for instance,
Mr- W- H. Wright in his introduction to The Great Detective Stories (Scribner's,
igay), consider the solution illegitimate. I fancy, however, that this opinion merely
represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the
nece^aiy data are given. The reader ought to be able to guess the criminal, if he
is sharp enough, and nobody can ask for more than this. It is, after all, the reader's
job to keep his wits about him, and, like the perfect detective, to suspect everybody.

J For a most fascinating and illuminating discussion of this question of viewpoint
In fiction, sec Mr. Percy Lubbock: The Craft of Tiction.

The Omnibus of Crime 99

sees, but are not told what he observes. Viewpoint No. 3 is that
of close intimacy with the detective; we see all he sees, and are
at once told his conclusions.

We begin from Viewpoint No. 2.

“Two bedroom doors faced him on the other side of the passage.
He opened that which was immediately opposite, and entered a
bedroom by no means austerely tidy. Some sticks and fishing-rods
stood confusedly in one corner, a pile of books in another. The
housemaid's hand had failed to give a look of order to the jumble
of heterogeneous objects left on the dressing-table and on the
mantel-shelf — pipes, penknives, pencils, keys, golf-balls, old letters,
photographs, small boxes, tins, and bottles. Two fine etchings and
some water-colour sketches hung on the walls; leaning against the
end of the wardrobe, unhung, were a few framed engravings."

First Shift: Viewpoint No. i.

“A row of shoes and boots were ranged beneath the window.
Trent crossed the room and studied them intently; then he meas-
ured some of them with his tape, whistling very softly. This done,
he sat on the side of the bed, and his eyes roamed gloomily about
the room."

Here we observe Trent walking, studying, measuring, whistling,
looking gloomy; but we do not know what was peculiar about
the boots, nor what the measurements were. From our knowledge
of Trent's character we may suppose that his conclusions are un-
favourable to the amiable suspect, Marlowe, but we are not our-
selves allowed to handle the material evidence.

Second Shift: Back to Viewpoint No. 2.

“The photographs on the mantel-shelf attracted him presently.
He rose and examined one representing Marlowe and Manderson
on horseback. Two others were views of famous peaks in the Alps.
There was a faded print of three youths-— one of them unmistakably
his acquaintance of the haggard blue eyes [i.e. Marlowe]— clothed
in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century. Another
was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling Marlowe.
Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the
mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs."

100

Dorothy L. Sayers

Here, as at the opening of the paragraph, we are promoted to
a more privileged position. We see all the evidence, and have
an equal opportunity with Trent of singling out the significant
detail — the fancy-costume portrait — and deducting from it that
Marlowe was an active member of the O.U.D.S., and, by infer-
ence, capable of acting a part at a pinch.

Third Shift: Viewpoint No. 5.

“Next he turned his attention to a flat leathern case that lay by
the cigarette-box. It opened easily. A small and light revolver, of
beautiful workmanship, was disclosed, with a score or so of loose
cartridges. On the stock were engraved the initials ‘J. M.' . . .

“With the pistol in its case between them, Trent and the In-
spector looked into each other's eyes for some moments. Trent was
the first to speak. This mystery is all wrong,’ he observed. *It is
insanity. The symptoms of mania are very marked. Let us see how
we stand.’ ’’

Throughout the rest of this scene we are taken into Trent’s
confidence. The revolver is described, we learn what Trent thinks
about it from his own lips.

Thus, in a single page, the viewpoint is completely shifted three
times, but so delicately that, unless we are looking for it, we do
not notice the change.

In a later chapter, we get the final shift to a fourth viewpoint —
that of complete mental identification with the detective:

“Mrs. Manderson had talked herself into a more emotional mood
than she had yet shown to Trent. Her words flowed freely, and her
voice had begun to ring and give play to a natural expressiveness
that must hitherto have been dulled, he thought, by the shock and
self-restraint of the past few days.“

Here the words *‘had yet shown to Trent’* clinch the identifica-
tion of viewpoint. Throughout the book, we always, in fact, see
Mrs. Manderson through Trent’s emotions, and the whole sec-
ond half of the story, when Trent has abandoned his own en-
quiries and is receiving the true explanation from Marlowe and
Guppies, is told from Viewpoint No. 4.

lOl

The Omnibus of Crime

The modern evolution in the direction of ''fair play’' is to a
great extent a revolution. It is a recoil from the Holmes influence
and a turning back to The Moonstone and its contemporaries.
There is no mystification about The Moonstone — no mystifica-
tion of the reader, that is. With such scrupulous care has Collins
laid the clues that the “ideal reasoner” might guess the entire out-
line of the story at the end of the first ten chapters of Betteredge’s
first narrative.f

Artistic Status of the Detective-Story

As the detective ceases to be impenetrable and infallible and
becomes a man touched with the feeling of our infirmities, so the
rigid technique of the art necessarily expands a little. In its sever-
est form, the mystery-story is a pure analytical exercise, and, as
such, may be a highly finished work of art, within its highly arti-
ficial limits. There is one respect, at least, in which the detective-
story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses
an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A def-
inite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its con-
clusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death. J It

♦ It is needless to add that the detectives must be given fair play, too. Once they
are embarked upon an investigation, no episode must ever be described which
does not come within their cognisance. It is artistically shocking that the reader
should be taken into the author’s confidence behind the investigator's back. Thus,
the reader’s interest in The Deductions of Colonel Gore (Lynn Brock) is sensibly
diminished by the fact of his knowing (as Gore does not) that it was Cecil Arndale
who witnessed the scene between Mrs. MeIhuish and Barrington near the beginning
of the book. Those tales in which the action is frequently punctuated by eaves-
dropping of this kind on the reader's part belong to the merely Sensational class
of detective-story, and rapidly decline into melodrama.

fPoe performed a similar feat in the case of Barnaby Budge, of which he
correctly prognosticated the whole development after reading the first serial part.
Unhappily, he was not alive to perform the same office for Edwin Droodl Dickens
came more and more to hanker after plot and mystery. His early efforts in this
style are crude, and the mystery as a rule pretty transparent. In Edwin Drood he
hoped that the ’"story would turn upon an interest suspended until the end,” and
the hope was only too thoroughly fulfilled. Undoubtedly his dose friendship with
Collins helped to infiuence him in the direction of mystery fiction; in the previous
year (1867) he had pronounced The Moonstone: ""Much better than anything he
[Collins] has done/"

JThis should appeal to Mr. E. M. Forster, who is troubled by the irrational
structure of the novel this point of view. Unhappily, he has openly avowed
himself ”too priggish” tc ,;njoy detective-stories. This is bad luck, indeed.

102

Dorothy L. Sayers

has the rounded (though limited) perfection of a triolet. The
farther it escapes from pure analysis, the more difficulty it has in
achieving artistic unity.

It does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level
of literary achievement. Though it deals with the most desperate
effects of rage, jealousy, and revenge, it rarely touches the heights
and depths of human passion. It presents us only with the fait
accompli^ and looks upon death and mutilation with a dispassion-
ate eye. It does not show us the inner workings of the murderer’s
mind — it must not; for the identity of the murderer is hidden un-
til the end of the book.* The victim is shown rather as a subject
for the dissecting-table than as a husband and father. A too violent
emotion flung into the glittering mechanism of the detective-story
jars the movement by disturbing its delicate balance. The most
successful writers are those who contrive to keep the story run-
ning from beginning to end upon the same emotional level, and
it is better to err in the direction of too little feeling than too
much. Here, the writer whose detective is a member of the offi-
cial force has an advantage: from him a detached attitude is cor-
rect; he can suitably retain the impersonal attitude of the surgeon.
The sprightly amateur must not be sprightly all the time, lest at
some point we should be reminded that this is, after all, a ques-
tion of somebody’s being foully murdered, and that flippancy is
indecent. To make the transition from the detached to the hu-
man point of view is one of the writer’s hardest tasks. It is espe-
cially hard when the murderer has been made human and sympa-
thetic. A real person has then to be brought to the gallows, and
this must not be done too lightheartedly. Mr. G. K. Chesterton
deals with this problem by merely refusing to face it. His Father
Brown (who looks at sin and crime from the religious point of

* An almost unique example of the detective-story told from the point of view
of the hunted instead of the hunter is Ashes to Ashes by Isabel Ostrander. This
shows the clues being left by the murderer, who is then compelled to look on
while they are picked up, one after the other, by the detectives, despite all his
desperate efforts to cover them. It is a very excellent piece of work which, in the
hands of a writer of a little more distinction, might have been a powerful master-
piece. Isabel Ostrander, who also wrote under the name of Robert Orr Chipperfield
and other pseudonyms, was a particularly competent spinner of yams. Her straight-
forward police-detective, McCarty, is always confounding the conclusions of Terhune
— a "‘scientific” private detective, who believes in modem psycho-analytical detective
apparatus.

The Omnibus of Crime 103

view) retires from the problem before the arrest is reached. He
is satisfied with a confession. The sordid details take place “off.**
Other authors permit sympathetic villains to commit suicide.
Thus, Mr. Milne’s Gillingham, whose attitude starts by being flip-
pant and ends by being rather sentimental, warns Cayley of his ap-
proaching arrest, and Cayley shoots himself, leaving a written con-
fession. Monsters of villainy can, of course, be brought to a bad
end without compunction; but modern taste rejects monsters,
therefore the modern detective-story is compelled to achieve a
higher level of writing, and a more competent delineation of
character. As the villain is allowed more good streaks in his com-
position, so the detective must achieve a tenderer human feeling
beneath his frivolity or machine-like efficiency.

Love Interest

One fettering convention, from which detective fiction is only
very slowly freeing itself, is that of the “love interest.” Publishers
and editors still labour under the delusion that all stories must
have a nice young man and woman who have to be united in the
last chapter. As a result, some of the finest detective-stories are
marred by a conventional love-story, irrelevant to the action and
perfunctorily worked in. The most harmless form of this disease
is that taken, for example, in the works of Mr. Austin Freeman.
His secondary characters fall in love with distressing regularity,
and perform a number of conventional antics suitable to persons
in their condition, but they do not interfere with the course of
the story. You can skip the love-passages if you like, and nothing
is lost. Far more blameworthy are the heroes who insist on fooling
about after young women when they ought to be putting their
minds on the job of detection. Just at the critical moment when
the trap is set to catch the villain, the sleuth learns that his best
girl has been spirited away. Heedlessly he drops everything, and
rushes off to Chinatown or to the lonely house on the marshes
or wherever it is, without even leaving a note to say where he is
going. Here he is promptly sandbagged or entrapped or other-
wise made a fool of, and the whole story is impeded and its logi-
cal development ruined.

104 Dorothy L. Sayers

The instances in which the love-story is an integral part of the
plot are extremely rare. One very beautiful example occurs in
The Moonstone. Here the entire plot hangs on the love of two
women for Franklin Blake. Both Rachel Verinder and Rosanna
Spearman know that he took the diamond, and the whole mys-
tery arises from their efforts to shield him. Their conduct is, in
both cases, completely natural and right, and the characters are
so finely conceived as to be entirely convincing. E. C. Bentley, in
Trent's Last Case^ has dealt finely with the still harder problem
of the detective in love. Trent’s love for Mrs. Manderson is a
legitimate part of the plot; while it does not prevent him from
drawing the proper conclusion from the evidence before him, it
does prevent him from acting upon his conclusions, and so pre-
pares the way for the real explanation. Incidentally, the love-story
is handled artistically and with persuasive emotion.

In The House of the Arrow and, still more strikingly, in No
Other Tiger ^ A. E. W. Mason has written stories of strong detec-
tive interest which at the same time have the convincing psycho-
logical structure of the novel of character. The characters are pre-
sented as a novelist presents them — ^romantically, it is true, but
without that stark insistence on classifying and explaining which
turns the persons of the ordinary detective-story into a collection
of museum exhibits.

Apart from such unusual instances as these, the less love in a
detective-story, the better. ''Uamour au thMtre/' says Racine, "'ne
pent pas itre en seconde place/' and this holds good of detective
fiction. A casual and perfunctory love-story is worse than no love-
story at all, and, since the mystery must, by hypothesis, take the
first place, the love is better left out.

Lynn Brock’s The Deductions of Colonel Gore affords a curious
illustration of this truth. Gore sets out, animated by an unselfish
devotion to a woman, to recover some compromising letters for
her, and, in so doing, becomes involved in unravelling an intri-
cate murder plot. As the story goes on, the references to the be-
loved woman become chillier and more perfunctory; not only
does the author seem to have lost interest, but so does Colonel
Gore. At length the author notices this, and explains it in a para-
graph:

The Omnibus of Crime 105

‘‘There were moments when Gore accused himself — or, rather,
felt that he ought to accuse himself — of an undue coldbloodedness
in these speculations of his. The business was a horrible business.
One ought to have been decently shocked by it. One ought to have
been horrified by the thought that three old friends were involved
in such a business.

“But the truth was — and his apologies to himself for that truth
became feebler and feebler — that the thing had now so caught
hold of him that he had come to regard the actors in it as merely
pieces of a puzzle bajBfling and engrossing to the verge of mono-
mania.”

There is the whole difficulty about allowing real human beings
into a detective-story. At some point or other, either their emo-
tions make hay of the detective interest, or the detective interest
gets hold of them and makes their emotions look like pasteboard.
It is, of course, a fact that we all adopt a detached attitude towards
“a good murder” in the newspaper. Like Betteredge in The Moon-
stone ^ we get “detective fever,” and forget the victim in the fun
of tracking the criminal. For this reason, it is better not to pitch
the emotional key too high at the start; the inevitable drop is
thus made less jarring.

Future Developments: Fashions and Formula

Just at present, therefore, the fashion in detective fiction is to
have characters credible and lively; not conventional, but, on the
other hand, not too profoundly studied — people who live more
or less on the Punch level of emotion. A little more psychological
complexity is allowed than formerly; the villain may not be a vil-
lain from every point of view; the heroine, if there is one, is not
necessarily pure; the falsely accused innocent need not be a sym-
pathetic character.* The automata — the embodied vices and vir-
tues — the weeping fair-haired girl — the stupid but manly young
man with the biceps — even the colossally evil scientist with the
hypnotic eyes — are all disappearing from the intellectual branch
of the art, to be replaced by figures having more in common with
humanity.

* e.g. in J. J. Connittgtoix’s The Tragedy at Ravensthorpe, where the agoraphobic
Maurice is by no means an agreeable person to have about the house.

io6 Dorothy L, Sayers

An interesting symptom of this tendency is the arrival of a
number of books and stories which recast, under the guise of fic*
tion, actual murder cases drawn from real life. Thus, Mrs. Belloc
Lowndes and Mrs. Victor Rickard have both dealt with the Bravo
Poisoning Mystery. Anthony Berkeley has retold the Maybrick
case; Mr. E. H. W. Meyerstein has published a play based on the
Seddon poisoning case, and Mr. Aldous Huxley, in “The Gio-
conda Smile,” has reinterpreted in his own manner another fam-
ous case of recent years.*

We are now in a position to ask ourselves the favourite ques-
tion of modern times: What next? Where is the detective-story
going? Has it a future? Or will the present boom see the end of it?

The Most Unlikely Person

In early mystery fiction, the problem tends to be, who did the
crime? At first, while readers were still unsophisticated, the for-
mula of the Most Unlikely Person had a good run. But the reader
soon learned to see through this. If there was a single person in
the story who appeared to have no motive for the crime and who
was allowed to amble through to the penultimate chapter free
from any shadow of suspicion, that character became a marked
man or woman. “I knew he must be guilty because nothing was
said about him,” said the cunning reader. Thus we come to a
new axiom, laid down by Mr. G. K. Chesterton in a brilliant es-
say in the New Statesman: the real criminal must be suspected at
least once in the course of the story. Once he is suspected, and
then (apparently) cleared, he is made safe from future suspicion.
This is the principle behind Mr. Wills Crofts’ impregnable alibis,
which are eventually broken down by painstaking enquiry. Prob-
ably the most baffling form of detective-story is still that in which
suspicion is distributed equally among a number of candidates,
one of whom turns out to be guilty. Other developments of the
Most Unlikely Person formula make the guilty person a juror at

• What Really Happened^ by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes; Not Sufficient Evidence, by
Mrs. Victor Rickard; The Wychford Poisoning Drama, by the Author of The Layton
Court Mystery; Heddon, by E. H. W. Meyerstein; Mortal Coils, by Aldous Huxley.

The Omnibus of Crime 107

the inquest or trial; * * * § the detective himself; f the counsel for the
prosecution; J and, as a supreme effort of unlikeliness, the actual
narrator of the story.§ Finally, resort has been made to the double-
cross, and the person originally suspected turns out to be the
right person after alL||

The Unexpected Means

There are signs, however, that the possibilities of the formula
are becoming exhausted, and of late years much has been done
in exploring the solution by the unexpected means. With recent
discoveries in medical and chemical science, this field has become
exceedingly fruitful, particularly in the provision of new methods
of murder. It is fortunate for the mystery-monger that, whereas,
up to the present, there is only one known way of getting born,
there are endless ways of getting killed. Here is a brief selection
of handy short cuts to the grave: Poisoned tooth-stoppings; lick-
ing poisoned stamps; shaving-brushes inoculated with dread dis-
eases; poisoned boiled eggs (a bright thought); poison-gas; a cat with
poisoned claws; poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the
ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle; electrocution by telephone;
biting by plague-rats and typhoid-carrying lice; boiling lead in
the ears (much more effective than cursed hebanon in a vial):
air-bubbles injected into the arteries; explosion of a gigantic
‘Trince Rupert’s drop”; frightening to death; hanging head-down-
wards; freezing to atoms in liquid air; hypodermic injections shot
from air-guns; exposure, while insensible, to extreme cold; guns
concealed in cameras; a thermometer which explodes a bomb
when the temperature of the room reaches a certain height; and
so forth.

The methods of disposing of inconvenient corpses are also var-
ied and peculiar; burial under a false certificate obtained in a

* Robert Orr ChipperfieM: The Man in the Jury-Box.

f Bernard Capes: The Skeleton Key; Gaston Leroux: MysUre de la Chambre
Jaune; etc

J G. K. Chesterton^^ “The Mirror of the Magistrate” (Innocence of Father Brown,,

§ Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

II Father R. Knox: The Viaduct Murder, and others.

io8 Dorothy L. Sayers

number of ways; substitution of one corpse for another (very
common in fiction, though rare in real life); mummification; re-
duction to bone-dust; electro-plating; arson; “planting’' (not in
the church-yard, but on innocent parties) — a method first made
famous by R. L. Stevenson.* Thus, of the three questions, “Who?”
“How?” and “Why?” “How” is at present the one which offers
most scope for surprise and ingenuity, and is capable of sustain-
ing an entire book on its own, though a combination of all three
naturally provides the best entertainment.f

The mystery-monger’s principal difficulty is that of varying his
surprises. “You know my methods, Watson,” says the detective,
and it is only too painfully true. The beauty of Watson was, of
course, that after thirty years he still did not know Holmes’s
methods; but the average reader is sharper-witted. After reading
half a dozen stories by one author, he is sufficiently advanced in
Dupin’s psychological method X to see with the author’s eyes. He
knows that, when Mr. Austin Freeman drowns somebody in a
pond full of water-snails, there will be something odd and local-
ised about those snails; he knows that, when one of Mr. Wills
Crofts’s characters has a cast-iron alibi, the alibi will turn out
to have holes in it; he knows that if Father Knox casts suspicion
on a Papist, the Papist will turn out to be innocent; instead of
detecting the murderer, he is engaged in detecting the writer.
That is why he gets the impression that the writer’s later books
are seldom or never “up to” his earlier efforts. He has become
married to the writer’s muse, and marriage has destroyed the
mystery.

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective-story
will some time come to an end, simply because the public will
have learnt all the tricks. But it has probably many years to go yet,
and in the meantime a new and less rigid formula will probably
have developed, linking it more closely to the novel of manners

• The Wrong Box,

j-Mr. Austin Freeman has specialised in a detective-story which rejects all three
questions. He tells the story of the crime first, and relies for his interest on the
pleasure afforded by following the ingenious methods of the investigator. The Sing-
ing Bone contains several tales of this type, Mr. Freeman has had few followers,
and appears to have himself abandoned the formula, which is rather a pity.

J As outlined in '‘The Purloined Letter.*'

The Omnibus of Crime log

and separating it more widely from the novel of adventure. The
latter will, no doubt, last as long as humanity, and while crime
exists, the crime thriller will hold its place. It is, as always, the
higher type that is threatened with extinction.

At the time of writing (1928) the detective-story is profiting by
a reaction against novels of the static type. Mr. E. M. Forster is
indeed left murmuring regretfully, *'Yes, ah! yes — the novel tells
a story’*; but the majority of the public are rediscovering that
fact with cries of triumph. Sexual abnormalities are suffering a
slight slump at the moment; the novel of passion still holds the
first place, especially among women, but even women seem to be
growing out of the simple love-story. Probably the cheerful cyni-
cism of the detective-tale suits better with the spirit of the times
than the sentimentality which ends in wedding bells. For, make
no mistake about it, the detective-story is part of the literature of
escape, and not of expression. We read tales of domestic unhappi-
ness because that is the kind of thing which happens to us; but
when these things gall too close to the sore, we fly to mystery
and adventure because they do not, as a rule, happen to us. “The
detective-story,” says Philip Guedalla, “is the normal recreation
of noble minds.” And it is remarkable how strong is the fascina-
tion of the higher type of detective-story for the intellectually-
minded, among writers as well as readers. The average detective-
novel to-day is extremely well written, and there are few good living
writers who have not tried their hand at it at one time or an-
other.*

♦Among men of letters distinguished in other lines who have turned their
attention to the detective-story may be mentioned A. E. W. Mason, Eden Phillpotts,
"Xynn Brock” (whose pseudonym protects the personality of a well-known writer),
Somerset Maugham, Rudyard Kipling, A, A. Milne, Father R. Knox, J. D. Beresford.

It is owing to the work of such men as these that the detective-novel reaches a
much higher artistic level in England than in any other country. At every turn the
quality of the writing and the attention to beauty of form and structure betray the
hand of the practised novelist.

The Professor and the Detective

(1929)

By Marjorie Mcolson

innnnfinnnnsTrnnm 00000 00 (>ooo(iXioooQ(ii^oo

Of the hundreds of published articles and essays discussing the
phenomenon of the detective story^ a clear majority have con-
cerned themselves, to the point of monotony, with expressions of
wonder that so frankly un-serious a literary form has managed to
attract as devoted readers so many men and women of superior
intellectual attainment. The common weakness of such articles
is that for the most part the writers have contented themselves
with mere statement of the paradox, without attempting to assay
the underlying reasons, A really thoughtful examination calcu-
lated to do simple justice to this interesting anomaly was long
overdue when Marjorie Nicolson published in the Atlantic
Monthly for April ipap the essay which follows. Miss Nicolson
is the former dean of the department of English at Smith Col-
lege, a past-national president of Phi Beta Kappa, and is presently
associated with Columbia University in New York City,

In generously granting permission to reprint her essay. Miss
Nicolson writes: ‘T hope it may be possible for you to call the
attention of your readers to the fact that this essay was published
in ip2p. The only part of the essay which I think is now seriously
out-of-date is my statement that women do not write good detec-
tive stories. In ipap Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ack-
royd was well known, but as I indicated in the essay, it was writ-
ten as a tour de force. In ip2p Dorothy Sayers was comparatively
little known in America, Ngaio Marsh was still in her {literary)
cradle. Other women like Mignon Eberhart and Leslie Ford were
just beginning to appear on the horizon. As a matter of fact, so
many of the best detective stories of the last decade have been
written by women that my statement sounds either naive or un-
critical, Since these women are among my favorite mystery au-

110

The Professor and the Detective m

thorSj 1 should not like readers to feel that I do not admire their
works. Therefore if you can call the readers' attention to the factj
you will relieve my conscience and I won't feel that I have sold
the ladies down the river!"

i)opooooooop 5 (oooodoooooooooooooooopoooo<ioooooooooo^?o^

The deadly after-dinner pause had arrived. During the hour of
the banquet itself, conversation had been general, if desultory;
but in the drawing-room an awkward hush descended. The hos-
tess surveyed with some alarm her tame lions, the most distin-
guished delegates to an international convocation of scholars.
Nervously she threw into the arena for dissection the latest sensa-
tions in the world of books, the ‘most provocative’ of all provoca-
tives, the ‘most startling’ of all exposes of human weakness. With
weary courtesy the lions oped their mastic jaws; but it was only
too obvious that the animals were lethargic. Desperately, she
turned to the distinguished scholar at her right — a man whose
name is known even to thousands who have never read his contri-
. butions.

‘Tell me,’ she begged, ‘what do you think is the most signifi-
cant book of recent years?*

‘There you have me,’ the great man declared with candor. ‘I
never can make up my mind between The Bellamy Trial and The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Of course, I know there are people
who would say that Greene Murder but . .

His hostess gasped. But in another moment her horror had
turned to amazement. Her lions forgot their tameness; the bodies
thrown into the arena were no longer the lay figures by which
they had been fooled so long. The odor of blood was in their nos-
trils. For an hour the struggle raged; and when at last the lions,
gorged with prey, had departed to their cages, they left behind
them a hostess who realized that her dinner had been a complete
triumph, who had learned the most valuable of all lessons for her
future entertainment of the academic guest: when all else fails,
start your professors upon the detective story — if they have not
already started themselvesl

112 Marjorie Nicolson

Throughout England and America to-day, you will find the
same thing to be true. Lending libraries in college towns are hard
put to it to keep up the supply; university librarians are forced
to lay in a private stock 'for faculty only.’ Let but two or three
academics gather together, and the inevitable conversation ensues.
At the meetings of learned societies this year, it will not be of the
new physics or the new astronomy, of the new morality or the new
psychology, that your specialists in these fields will be debating,
but of footprints and thumb marks, of the possibility of poison-
ing by means of candles, of the chances of opening a locked door
with a pair of tweezers and a piece of string! More heated the
arguments, more violent the discussions, than ever were the con-
tentions of mediaeval schoolmen. And in time to come, when
we shall have been gathered to our ancestors, you will find us,
not in Paradise, but, like that little group of Milton’s fallen angels
in Hell, ‘in discourse more sweet’ than were ever hymns of re-
joicing, sitting apart on some ‘retir’d’ hill, unaware of Pande-
monium, unaware of Hades, while around us giants and demons
tear up mountains and cast them into the sea, ‘reasoning high’
of clues and openings, of poisons and daggers, of tricks for dispos-
ing of unwanted bodies, of Dr. Thorndyke and of Colonel Gore.

That glib expositor of all mysteries, the pseudo-psychologist,
has an explanation, of course. To the academic mind, he avers,
detective stories constitute the ‘literature of escape.’ He goes even
further: our lives, we hear, are barren and narrow; our college
walls (not even modern American architecture can shake this
metaphor) hem in a little unreal world, in which wander lost
spirits, ghosts and shades as melancholy as any who ever haunted
the tenebrous Styx, wailing — ^not, like those spirits, for a life they
had lost — ^but for a life we have never had. Inhibited by our un-
natural existence, we find ‘release’ in books of blood and thunder.
Through tales of abduction and poisoning, shooting and stab-
bing, we are able to wallow for a moment in adventures we can-
not share, to lose ourselves for an evening in a world of excite-
ment, and return next day 'to our dry-as-dust lectures, refreshed

The Professor and the Detective 113

by vicarious violence. Unworldly, unnatural academics, who
would deny us our brief moment's respite! So, having explained
us to his own satisfaction, having neatly docketed us in his capa-
cious catalogue, the pseudo-psychologist passes on to fresher
woods. Like an earlier gentleman, somewhat hasty in generaliza-
tion, he does not stay for an answer.

Nor, I must confess, would we bother to give it to him, did he
stay. For how can we explain to such as he that escape, in the
sense in which he means it, is the last thing in the world the aca-
demic mind either requires or wishes? How can he know that, as
a group, we are more free from 'suppressed desires,' 'inhibitions,'
and ‘complexes’ than any other group in the world to-day? It
is not from the life of the mind that we seek release, nor is it
that we may flee from the bondage of academic walls that we
revel in the literature of escape.

Yet, in a sense which he does not understand, the academic
reader is turning to the detective story to-day seeking release. Con-
sciously in eighty per cent of the cases, unconsciously in the other
two tenths, he has reached the limit of his endurance of charac-
teristically 'contemporary' literature. Contrary to the usual belief,
the college professor to-day does keep up with recent literature.
Gone is the bearded visionary who was a child in the affairs of
the world, the pedant who boasted that he had read nothing pub-
lished since 1660. There are few professors in the colleges of the
arts who are not familiar with the 'latest' in drama, in fiction, in
poetry. If the family budget will not cover the new books, there
are the local book clubs; and, when all else fails, there are al-
ways the community bookshops, whose tables are surrounded by
poverty-stricken academics, grimly reading the newest arrivals,
standing now on one foot, now on the other, peering determinedly
between uncut pages. Probably no other group except the profes-
sional book reviewers has, during the last ten years, waded
through so many thousands of pages of psychological analysis. And
now we are reaping the whirlwind.

Yes, the detective story does constitute escape; but it is escape
not from life, but from literature. We grant willingly that we find
in it release. Our 'revolt' — so mysteriously explained by the psy-
chologists — ^is simple enough: we have revolted from an excessive

114 Marjorie Nicolson

subjectivity to welcome objectivity; from long-drawn-out dissec-
tions of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from re-
iterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of cir-
cumstances or of their glands to a suggestion that men and women
may consciously plot and consciously plan; from the 'stream of
consciousness’ which threatens to engulf us in its Lethean monot-
ony to analyses of purpose, controlled and directed by a thinking
mind; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the
mature; most of all, from a smart and easy pessimism which in-
terprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposeless-
ness to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All
this we find in the detective story.

We are not alone in our revolt against the ‘psychological novel,’
but perhaps our cry for release is more passionate than that of
any other group. As the new book lists appear in spring and au-
tumn, as the brilliant new covers in violent hues bedeck the win-
dows of the bookshops, as the publishers’ blurbs grow necessarily
more and more superlative, you may hear rising and swelling in
protest the litany of the professors: ‘From the most profound and
searching dissection of human emotions; from the poignant cry
of a human soul; from the daring analysis of the springs of human
action; from the wings of pain and ecstasy; from the brutal frank-
ness of the seeker after truth; from the lyric passion of a youth-
ful heart; from the biting and mordant wit of a satirist swifter
than Swift; from the provocative demolishment of a fusty Vic-
torianism; from the ruthless exposure of the shams and hypocrisies
of the age — Good Lord, deliver us!’

The chant is not ours alone; but assuredly our groans are
deeper, our revolt more violent. For, to all whose daily contact
is with college students, but most to those who profess to teach
‘English,’ the characteristic contemporary novel seems but the
student theme, swelled to Gargantuan proportions. We wade
yearly through pounds of paper liberally sprinkled with the pro-
noun ‘I’; we have long ceased to expect complete sentences — and
never even hope for complete thoughts; dots and dashes we ac-
cept as the only possible marks of punctuation. We read with a
Jaundiced eye dissections of human nature which their authors
at least believe to be profound and searching. We listen to lyric

The Professor and the Detective 115

cries and passionate outbursts until our ears are weary. We fol-
low the brutal destruction and the searching for truth of young
authors, automatically correcting their spelling as we do so. We
suggest as delicately as possible — ^remembering always the sacred
‘individuality’ of these young people with which we must not
interfere — that imitation of Mr. Mencken is not always the sin-
cerest form of flattery. We labor all day with a generation which
has always reacted — never been forced to think or consider or
fudge. Is it any wonder that, when the last paper has been cor-
rected, the last reaction tabulated, we reach out a weary hand
for books which will be as different as possible? Having labored
all day with minds that are — and should be — those of sophomores,
is there any reason why we should wish to spend our nights with
literature that is sophomoric?

We revolt truly enough against subjectivity, because we are too
used to promising young authors, who interpret their individual
growing pains in terms of cosmic convulsions. We are clearly
aware that adolescence will always emphasize the T; will always
find dissection of emotion more thrilling than analysis of intellect;
will always fall victim to easy philosophies of pessimism and skep-
ticism; will always prefer the formless, the vague, to the ordered,
the defined; will always believe that it is facing the facts with
candor and fearlessness — though, in reality, facts are so much less
spectacular and so much less interesting than youth believes. But
all this is the inevitable and natural feeling of adolescence. We
whose business it is to teach the young accept it with tolerance,
with sympathy — ^more frequently than the world believes, with
humor. It is not strange, however, that we do not turn tq-day
for release to those children of a larger growth, the contemporary
novelists, the ‘bad boys’ and ‘smart girls’ of literature. It is not
mere chance that this decade is seeing a recrudescence of interest,
on the part of thoughtful readers, in that most mature age of
writing, the eighteenth century; that to-day Boswell and Johnson,
Swift and Voltaire, are being read by constantly increasing num-
bers. These were men, not boys; their wit was intellectual, their
method analytical; their appeal is constantly to the mind, never
to the emotions.

It is likewise not mere coincidence that scholars, philosophers.

ii6 Marjorie Nicolson

economists, are creating a demand for detective stories unparal-
leled in the past; that the art which might otherwise have been
expended upon literature is transforming the once-despised
^thriller' into what may easily become a new classic; that Oxford
and Cambridge dons, a distinguished economist, a supposedly dis-
tinguished aesthetician (we have only his pseudonymous word for
his identity), an historian, and a scientist should have set them-
selves to this new and entrancing craft. More than one well-
known author, weary unto death of introspective and psychologi-
cal literature, has turned with relief to this sole department of
fiction in which it is still possible to tell a story. Gilbert Chester-
ton and Hilaire Belloc were pioneers; Lord Charnwood, A. A.
Milne, and J. B. Priestley follow gladly after. It is, we granted
earlier, escape; but the more one ponders, the more the question
insistently thrusts itself forward: Is it not also return?

Certainly it is a return to the novel of plot and incident —
that genre despised these many years by litterateurs. The appeal
of the detective story lies in its action, its episodes. Gone are the
pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel, the conditional modes;
the present, the progressive, the definite past — these are the tenses
of the novel of action. Character — so worshiped by the psychologi-
cal novelists — troubles us little, though characters we have in
abundance. Characters addicted to dependence upon the sub-
conscious or upon the glands need not apply; men and women
need all their conscious wits about them in the detective yarn.
One brooding moment, one pluperfect tense, one conditional
mode, may be fatal. We grant that our characters are largely pup-
pets, and we are delighted once more to see the marionettes dance
while a strong and adept hand pulls the strings cleverly. Our real
interest is not in the puppets, but in the brain which designed
them. Yet characters have emerged from the new detective form,
in spite of their authors. The modern detective is as individual
as Sherlock Holmes — though less and less often is he patterned
after that famous sleuth. Our detective is made in our image and
in that of the author; like ourselves, he can make mistakes; he

The Professor and the Detective 117

is no longer omniscient or ubiquitous. We are passing away from
the strong silent man who, after days of secret working, produces
a villain whom we could neveir have suspected. Sometimes, in-
deed, the detective is wrong until the last chapter; sometimes,
again, both he and we suspect the villain long before we can
prove his guilt, and our interest, like the detective’s, is less in the
discovery than in the establishment of guilt. The nameless in-
spector of Scotland Yard has become, for instance, Inspector
French, who more than once is puzzled and confused by false
trails.

Often the detective is not a professional at all, or at least not
one connected with one of the central bureaus here or abroad.
There is Poirot, who is conveniently found upon the Blue Train
at the needed moment, who even was known to settle down in Eng-
land for a time, growing cabbages, while he waited for murder
to be committed. There is Dr. Thorndyke, the medico-legal wiz-
ard, from whom we simple academics have learned most of the
natural science we know. There is the amateur Colonel Gore,
who began his career by a chance application for a golf secretary-
ship, and has now opened his own private inquiry office — a move-
ment which his admirers greet with pleasure, as promising an in-
definite number of cases for the future. There is our friend the
expert in poisons, who lives in his house around the corner from
the British Museum, whence he is summoned at dead of night by
the butler to a noble family and precipitated into a mystery he
does not choose to solve. There is even the psychological detec-
tive, keeping us up with the times. Yet, though we welcome the
technique of his creator, and call him master, many of the weary
academics are inclined to resent that upstart Philo Vance, whose
manners — like his footnotes — smack too much of the ‘smart’
young novelists and students from whom we are escaping. With
all these characters, however, familiar though they are to us, the
interest of the readpr lies never in what they are, but in what
they do. If they emerge as individuals, they emerge still from the
novel of action.

We have revolted also against contemporary realism, and in
these novels we return to an earlier manner. As every connoisseur
knows, the charm of the pure detective story lies in its utter un-

ii8 Marjorie Nicolson

reality. This is a point the untrained reader does not comprehend.
He wonders at our callousness, at our evident lack of sensitive-
ness; he cannot understand how we can wade eagerly through
streams of blood, how we can pursue our man even to the gallows
with the detachment of Dr. Thorndyke himself. He is tortured
by visions of bloodstained rugs; he shudders at the smoking re-
volver, the knife still sticking in the wound. 1 dreamed all night
of people lying in pools of blood,’ declared my unsympathetic
friend at breakfast this morning. ‘How can you read those things
and go to sleep at all?’ And she will never believe me quite a hu-
man being again because I assured her that after five murders I
can put out the light and sleep like a child until morning, the
reason being that where she has seen, with horrible distinctness,
an old man lying in a pool of his own blood, I had seen — a dia-
gram. She brings to the thriller a mind accustomed to realism.
But the essence of this new detective story lies in its complete
unreality.

Hence, though we may read them also, we connoisseurs tend to
disparage those novels of the Poe school, whose authors attempt
to work upon the emotions; interesting they may be, but never
in the purest style. No one of us ever believes that the murder
actually occurred; no one of our best authors attempts to persuade
us that it ever could occur. We come to the detective -story with a
sigh of relief — the one form of novel to-day which does not in-
sist that we must lose ourselves to find ourselves; the one form
of contemporary literature in which our cool impersonality need
never fail. That, of course, is the great difference between detec-
tive literature and contemporary journalistic accounts of murders,
in which we have no interest. Not for a moment can you fool us,
either, with collections of True Detective Stories^ or confessions
of actual criminals. We seek our chamber of horrors with no ado-
lescent or morbid desire to be shocked, startled, horrified. We
handle the instruments of the crime with scientific detachment.
It is for us an enthralling game, which must be played with skill
and science, in which the pieces possess no more real personality
than do the knights and bishops and pawns of chess, the kings and
queens of bridge. Mediaeval writers, to be sure, delighted in al-
legories of chess, in which the pieces took on moral or spiritual

The Professor and the Detective 119

significance; but those who seek to read character and emotion
into our pieces and our cards miss the essence of this most en-
trancing game.

Here perhaps we approach the real centre of the whole matter,
which explains both our revolt and our return, and suggests the
peculiar characteristic of this new style of writing. Your chess
player will sit by the hour in frowning contemplation before a
board set with pieces. Your true bridge player finds his real life
when the cards are dealt and the contest of wits begins. Your
crossword-puzzle expert, dictionary on knee, spends evening after
evening in solitary occupation. In each case the expert, though
kind enough in other relations of life, despises the amateur. So
too the connoisseur of detective stories. We restrain ourselves with
difficulty when the occasional reader seeks to dispute with us, to
enter into conversations and debates sacred to the initiate. It is
as if a body of specialists, — ^physicists, astronomers, and mathe-
maticians, — met to discuss the Einstein theory, were to be forced,
for politeness’ sake, to talk about the concept of relativity with
a bright youngster who labored under the popular delusion that
Mr. Einstein has somehow reformed — or destroyed — the moral
standard. We who are connoisseurs are profound and constant
students of the new science, as regular in our practice of the art
as the most passionate bridge or chess player. We *keep up* as
assiduously with the output as the physician, the scientist, the
scholar, with learned journals. From ten to one at night is our
favorite period for reading; the bedside table holds a varied as-
sortment, drawn from rental collections or from the libraries of
our wealthier colleagues.

Like the crossword puzzle, ours is a game which must be played
alone; yet on the other hand, as in chess, the antagonists are
really two, for the detective story is a battle royal between the
author and the reader, and the great glory of the contemporary
form is that we both accept it as such. How their eyes must
twinkle — those creators of heroes and villains — ^as they set out
their pieces before the game begins. They are the only authors,
we must believe, who to-day find fun in writing. As in all other
games, much depends upon the opening move, the significance of
which each expert fully understands. We have our favorite open-

120 , Marjorie Nicolson

ings, to be sure, though we recognize all the traditional ones.
The familiar scene in the oak-paneled library, the white-haired
man sprawling upon his desk, two glasses beside him, the electric
light still burning — it is for us photographically real, though
never realistic. We know it as a type opening in our game of chess.
No detective quicker than we to be on the watch for clues: the
torn letter, the soiled blotter, the burned paper on the hearth,
the screen moved askew, particularly the book out of place on the
shelves — if our author is an expert, each of these has had its mean-
ing to him, and must to us. Or there is that other familiar open-
ing move — the body discovered in a place far from all human
haunts (this year tending to be fished up in a basket or packing
case from the depths of the sea). There is no limitation to the
number of places in which murder may be committed; the very
spot a real criminal would most surely avoid becomes for us a
glorious experiment. We have had more than one murder on a
golf links; no less than three of the season’s favorites occur on
a train — a device more customary in the English carriages than
in American cars, though we still remember loyally The Man in
Lower Ten,

As the game proceeds, there are countless other signals which
we know and watch for. The move of your opponent and his dis-
card are as important here as ever in bridge or chess. We learn
new moves and tricks at every game. We can distinguish with
deadly precision among tobaccos we have never seen; let but a
character casually be caught smoking an exotic cigarette in a yel-
lowish paper, and we have our eye upon him till the end. You
cannot fool us with the obvious tricks of a decade ago — and what
scorn we heap upon an amateur who attempts to write for us,
knowing far less of technique than we know ourselves. We are
aware that finger prints may be forged; we can tell you more ac-
curately than many a scientist what will happen to your footprints
if you try to walk backward, if you are wearing borrowed shoes,
or if you insist on carrying through the garden the corpse of the
gentleman you have recently killed. We can tell you the exact
angle at which your body will hang if you commit suicide with
your silk stockings. We can detect with unerring precision
whether the body found by the railroad tracks is that of a man

121

The Professor and the Detective

killed by accident or murdered before the train passed. We can
distinguish with more deadly accuracy than your hairdresser
whether your hair is dyed, whether its wave is permanent or real.

Modern inventions are daily making our task more difficult. We
have long been familiar with the dictaphone as a device for se-
curing an alibi. We are not fooled by photographic evidence,
which we know may have been faked. But the radio and the wire-
less, and particularly the airplane, give us pause. We used to
know, as well as Bradshaw, the exact time of departure of every
train in the British Isles, and the length of every journey in the
United States. We know the location of every public airport in
three countries; but the growing tendency toward private owner-
ship of aircraft occasionally causes us trouble in our computa-
tions.

On the whole, we incline to deprecate the use of utopian de-
vices on the part of our authors — the death ray, the drug which
produces indefinite hypnosis, the fourth dimension. We dislike
as a group the unfair use of amnesia and aphasia, just as we dis-
like the subconscious. Being the fairest-minded of all readers, we
demand that our characters be given every chance, and we feel
it is not 'cricket’ if they are forced to work against undue psycho-
logical influence. We demand of our authors fair play; and for the
most part we get it in full measure. Gone are the days of the
identical twin, the long-lost brother from Australia. Gone for the
most part is the trick ending — though over the last pages of
Roger Ackroyd we divide into two passionate camps. My own
party insists that that is not a trick ending in which every single
thread has been put into our hands, every device has been a
familiar one. Regretfully we acknowledge that, once used, that
ending can never be employed again; nevertheless, the novel re-
mains to us a classic, one of the few that ever completely fooled us.

And as we grow in knowledge and experience, it is becoming
increasingly hard to fool us. It is seldom, indeed, that we do not
know the identity of the murderer long before he is taken into
custody. But if you think that such foreknowledge spoils the in-
terest, you do not understand the new science. In that grimly con-
tested battle of wits, it is inevitable that we should guess, unless
the author is far more skilled than we. But once the decision is

122! Marjorie Nicolson

fairly certain in our minds, we have the added pleasure of watch-
ing the author’s technique, of checking those passages in which
he is tiying to send us off the track. Just as he tries his best (and
less than his best we will not have) to deceive us, so we do our
best to catch him out. In this new game, both scrupulously ob-
serve the rules, but both of us know the rules so well that we
take delight in reading each other’s signals. The burden which
the connoisseur is laying upon the writers of detective fiction to-
day is a heavy one; but gallantly the best of them are accepting
the challenge. This very interaction of specialized authors and
readers in a new and international game is producing some of the
cleverest technique in fiction to-day, and is developing in that
fiction some remarkably interesting characteristics.

It is forcing upon the author a complete objectivity and im-
personality in the handling of his material, which in the past has
been peculiar to the highest art. I have suggested that this lack
of subjectivity constitutes the chief appeal of the detective novel
to its academic readers to-day. From the self-consciousness of
youthful writers, who, having psychoanalyzed themselves, would
seek to persuade us also of the astounding discovery that we are
much like other men, we turn to breathe the purer air serene of
complete impassivity, forced upon authors by the exigencies of the
situation. One false step, and the enemy is ours. Let the author for a
moment suggest a personal reaction, a sentimental affection for his
character, and we have him on the hip. There is no group of readers
so quick to catch a false cadence in an author’s voice. And this re-
quirement is having another effect upon technique. The author
must weigh and balance all his characters; he cannot have a single
unnecessary one; he cannot introduce a servant whom we will not
scan sharply. The simplest action, the slightest gesture, is pregnant
with meaning. He knows it, and so do we.

Very different, this insistence upon selection, from the all-in-
clusiveness of a Ulysses. The author is forced every moment to be
alert, on guard; nothing can be left to chance, no unnecessary
comments introduced. In this form of contemporary literature
alone, ungovemed emotional reactions are fatal. Hence the pure
detective story to-day is never — ^and what a relief! — a love story.
If the love element is introduced at all, — the connoisseur prefers

The Professor and the Detective 123

that it be omitted, — it must be distinctly subordinated, for to
make your hero and your heroine sympathetic enough to permit
their love story is at once to free them from the list of possible
suspects. And in the pure detective story, as in that grimmest of
legal theories, every man and woman is guilty until he has proved
himself innocent. Our detective story has thus returned to-day to
a welcome insistence that love between the sexes is not the only
possible motif for fiction: jealousy, hatred, greed, anger, loyalty,
friendship, parental affection — ^all these are our themes. No longer
is the wellspring of man’s conduct to be found only in the instinct
of sex.

And, indeed, this change of emphasis is producing a curious ef-
fect upon the treatment of women in the detective novel. Men
characters are always in the majority; the detective story, indeed,
is primarily a man’s novel. Many women dislike it heartily, or at
best accept it as a device to while away hours on the train. And
while we do all honor to the three or four women who have writ-
ten surpassingly good detective stories of the purest type, we must
grant candidly that the great bulk of our detective stories to-day
are being written by men — again, perhaps, because of their escape
from a school of fiction which is becoming too largely feminized.
It is noticeable also that the woman characters in these contempo-
rary stories are no longer inevitably sympathetic. More than once
the victim is a woman; and even here, where our authors might
become sentimental, we notice their impassivity. For in the great
majority of cases the victim in a murder story is one who richly
deserved to die. One or two authors have experimented with the
woman detective, but for the most part with little success. Apart
from minor characters, the two important roles in the detective
story for women are, alliteratively enough, victim and villainess.
With the changing standards of sentimentality, there is no longer
any assurance that a woman character is not the murderer. Time
was when we could dismiss women with a wave of the hand; but
all of us think of at least four contemporary heroines, three of
them young and beautiful, who in the end turn out to be cold
and calculating murderers. Inevitably, too, we recall the more
subtle ending of The Bellamy Trial Whatever may be the sen-
timental reaction of modern judges and juries in our courts of

1^4 Marjorie Nicolson

law, in the high tribunal of the detective story women are no
longer sacred.

A high tribunal it is. Earlier, I suggested that our revolt was
from a smart and easy pessimism, which interprets the universe in
terms of relativity and purposelessness, our return to an older
and more primitive conception of the cosmic order. Here lies, I
believe, the really unique contribution of the detective story to
contemporary ethics. With the engaging paradox of the old lady
in Punch, who sought through shelves of psychological literature
for *a nice love story — ^without any sex,’ we weary academics seek
refreshment in a highly moral murder. Perhaps we are protest-
ing against a conception of the universe as governed — if governed
at all — by chance, by haphazard circumstance; against a theory
which interprets the way of life as like the river in the ‘Vision
of Mirza,’ the bridge of San Luis Rey; against a conception of
men and women as purposeless, aimless, impotent; against a
theory of the world as wandering, devoid of purpose and mean-
ing, in unlimited space. In our detective stories we find with re-
lief a return to an older ethics and metaphysics: an Hebraic in-
sistence upon justice as the measure of all things — an eye for an
eye, and a tooth for a tooth; a Greek feeling of inevitability, for
man as the victim of circumstances and fate, to be sure, but a fate
brought upon him by his own carelessness, his own ignorance, or
his own choice; a Calvinistic insistence, if you will, upon destiny,
but a Calvinistic belief also in the need for tense and constant
activity on the part of man: last of all, a scientific insistence upon
the inevitable operation of cause and effect. For never, in the just
world of the detective story, does the murderer go undetected;
never does justice fail in the end. No matter how charming, how
lovable, the ’murderer, or how justifiable the killing, there is no
escaping the implacable avenging Nemesis of our modern detec-
tive, Fury and Fate in one.

To be sure, we will not condemn our charming murderer to
the gallows, for we are artists as well as moralists. We will allow
the debonair, the charming rogue one final gallant moment — the
sudden spurt of the match’s flame as, for the last time, he lights
his cigarette with that nonchalance we know so well. Do we not
realize as well as he that that last cigarette is the one all well-

The Professor and the Detective 125

trained murderers carry constantly for this purpose? We allow the
murderess the reward of her cleverness — the last swift motion as
the cyanide reaches her lips or the knife her heart. Yet the life
must be spent for the life. Like the Greek dramatist, we excuse
neither ignorance nor carelessness. No matter how great the per-
sonality, how masterful the mind, by one single slip he is hoist
with his own petard. By fate or predestination, — ^what you will, —
the murderer is from the beginning condemned to his end; his
election is sealed. Not for a moment does our neo-Calvinistic jus-
tice permit him to go down to punishment without an intense
struggle to escape the consequence of his act. But our science and
our theology, our ethics and our metaphysics, are based upon a
belief in implacable justice, in the orderly operation of cause and
ejffect, in a universe governed by order, founded on eternal and
immutable law.

Ill

Perhaps it is for this reason that the most persistent readers of
detective literature to-day are the philosophers and the scientists
who were bred under an older system of belief. It may be that
their revolt from a changing universe, without standard and with-
out order, is a return to a simpler causality under which they are
more at home. They alone can tell. One thing more, however,
I may add to our apologia. What eflfect this addiction to detective
literature is having without the college world I cannot pretend
to say; another must speak for its influence upon the life of the
capitalist, the physician, the president-elect. But I dare challenge
the academic critics to say that in the field of scholarship it is not
making for a new vitality. After all, what essential difference is
there between the technique of the detective tracking his quarry
through Europe and that of the historian tracking his fact, the
philosopher his idea, down the ages? Watch the behavior of your
professor for but an hour, and you know him for what he is. Do
his eyes sparkle, his cheeks flush, as he pursues his idea, forgetting
his class, forgetting his audience, as he leaps from historical thumb
mark to ethical footprint, from cigarette stub to empty glass? If
so, he's the man for your money. In the long conversation which

126 Marjorie Nicolson

follows, though you begin with the quantum theory or the in-
fluence of Plato, you will end with Dr. Thorndyke or Hercule
Poirot.

And if you come to compare the methods by which the scientist
or the philosopher has reached his conclusions, you will find that
they are merely those of his favorite detective. Only two methods
are open to him, as to them. He may work by the Baconian
method of Scotland Yard: he may laboriously and carefully ac-
cumulate all possible clues, passing over nothing as too insignifi-
cant, filling his little boxes and envelopes with all that comes
his way, making no hypothesis, anticipating no conclusion, be-
lieving the man innocent until he can prove him guilty. Here
he finds a single thread, there a grain of rice dropped in a draw-
ing-room; here he measures a footprint, there he photographs a
thumb mark. His loot finally collected, he of Scotland Yard will
select the ‘dominant clue,’ and that he will follow with grim per-
sistence until the end. Weary but victorious, he stands at last out-
side the prison to which he has condemned his idea, and listens
to the passing bell. That is one method. But if he is of the op-
posite nature, he will follow the method of ‘intuition,’ upon
which the detective bureaus of the country of Descartes have based
their work. To him the tom cigarette and the discarded blotter
are of little importance; he leaves such things for his indefatigable
rivals of Scotland Yard. Tucked away behind the rose bushes in
the garden maze, he devotes himself to thought. Having, like his
great predecessor, thought away all else in the universe, nothing
remains but the culprit. By strength of logic alone, he has recon-
stituted the universe, and in his proper place has set the villain
of the piece.

Yes, those are the only two methods, both in scholarship and
in the pursuit of criminals. For, after all, scholars are, in the end,
only the detectives of thoughts. The canvas is vaster, the search
more extensive; the ‘case’ takes, not a few weeks, but a lifetime.
Yet, in the end, method and conclusion are the same. Evening
after evening, throughout the length and breadth of the country,
lights bum longer and longer in academic studies, and philos-
ophers, scientists, historians, settle down with sighs of content to
the latest and most lurid murder tale. Yet the professorial reader.

The Professor and the Detective 127

pursuing with eager interest the exploits of Dr. Thorndyke or
of Colonel Gore, is not, in the last analysis, escaping from his
repressions; is not even consciously returning from the present to
the past; but is merely carrying over to another medium the fun
of the chase, the ardor of the pursuit, which makes his life a long
and eager and active quest, from which he would not willingly
accept release.

Masters of Mystery

(1931)

By H. Douglas Thomson

ITo oooocooo(r dTSlJ ©(Tooooooooooooooooodooooooofloooo oinnnnf

The gigantic strides made by the detective novel in England and
America during the 1920's — together with the heightened critical
interest on all sides — made the first full-length study of the form
in the English language virtually inevitable. This was H. Douglas
Thomson's Masters o£ Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story
(London: Collins^ 19^1). Mr. Thomson's work was not^ to be sure,
the first book-length treatment in any language: Friedrich Dep-
ken's Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, und Ihre Vorbilder: Ein Beitrag
zur Entwicklungsgeschichte und Technik der Kriminalerzahlung
{Heidelberg, 1914) and Regis Messac's ponderous and curious
698-page exegesis Le ‘‘Detective Novel’' et L’Influence de la Pen-
see Scientifique (Paris, X929) were both earlier at the post. In
view, however, of the rather forbidding academism and esoteric
content of these continental considerations, Thomson may fairly
be termed the first major historian anywhere of the contemporary
police romance as living literature. Withal that internal testimony
suggests some portions of his work, too, may have been prepared
with a scholastic purpose in mind, the modernity of his approach
and his agreeable and accomplished discursive style set him some
worlds apart from his formalistic French and German colleagues.
His book reads as if he wrote it for his own enjoyment — which is
as it should be. So far as can be ascertained, Mr. Thomson has
never contributed fictionally to the genre of which he writes so
well. The best evidence is that he is an English layman: like your
present editor a detection "'buff/' or amateur of published crime.
The selection printed here is taken from the opening chapter of
Masters of Mystery — which work, incidentally, is an almost un-
obtainable collector's item on either side of the water today.

pooooaoooA

128

Masters of Mystery 129

In its simplest form the detective story is a puzzle to be solved,
the plot consisting in a logical deduction of the solution from the
existing data. In this statement of the subject I am not uncon-
scious of the implications of the language I have adopted. For I
am insisting that the construction is essentially synthetic and sci-
entific. Perhaps herein lies the detective story’s attraction to E. M.
Wrong’s '‘highly educated” people, and also the failure of some of
the cleverest detective stories when expressed through the media
of the stage and the screen. Note that even in my italics I am vague;
I do not say, for example, when the data begin to exist.

The detective story is, then, a problem; a dramatic problem, a
"feather to tickle the intellect.” The basic element is rational
theorising. In “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” Sherlock
Holmes takes Dr. Watson to task for not confining himself to a
bare record of the logical synthesis, “that severe reasoning from
cause to effect.”

“If I claim full Justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal
thing — a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare.
Therefore, it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you
should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course
of lectures into a series of tales,”

The problem itself is of a curious and complex kind. Only at
the beginning is it simple and defined. Thereafter it is a chame-
leon, changing colour as every page is turned. Our difficulties
multiply; the problem is modified, then changed out of all know-
ing. Whereas we started with the simple question, Who killed
So-and-So? we have now, in addition, to account for an alibi, or
— ^more welcome labour, to find one. Every chapter brings in fresh
information. We cannot say at such and such a place in the story,
“Now that I have my data, I can sit back in my chair and argue
it out as Descartes argued out his philosophical principles.”

Suppose we take up for a moment the attitude of the dis-
gruntled reader:—

“You rather presume on your cleverness, Mr. Author. You may
steal a march on me, but is it by fair methods? You start by giving
me a fact — ^the murder. You set me the problem of finding the
murderer, but I must ask no questions. You tell me the victim

igo H. Douglas Thomson

was found in articulo mortis with his left hand firmly grasping
the third waistcoat button; and that of two glasses of beer found
on the table one was left unfinished — a fact which proves the mur-
dered man was neither a gentleman, nor a man of taste, as the
beer happened to be . . . (well, your own brand, plus commis-
sion). In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these homely touches
will have nothing to do with your solution. When I am trying to
have a morbid interest in the corpse — its dimensions and attitude
— you whisk me off to fresh woods. You introduce me as fast as
you can to your dramatis personce — as though I were royalty and
had so many handshakes to accomplish in so many seconds. Then
you seem to fasten with some injustice on one of this motley
crowd. In an insinuating way you ask: If he was not drinking
beer with the murdered man on the night of the murder, where
was he?* You seem to forget that there are some people who do
not prefer to account for their actions between ten and twelve
o'clock of a Friday night.

“Next you set me puzzling my wits why your blessed detective
has gone to Paris. You see I’m the actuality of the legal myth* —
the reasonable man. If your detective goes off to Paris without
a word to a soul — even to his accommodating landlady — ^well,
Fm bound to think the worst.

“You set me the problem of finding out the why, the how and
the wherefore of this murder. You won’t for a minute let me go
the reasonable way about it. You are as evasive as a Hyde Park
orator. You only give me pinches of information, and slake my
curiosity by throwing me the golden apples of fresh problems
easier of solution, and for that reason more momentarily attrac-
tive. Sometimes these are connected with the main issue — but not
always. Small wonder then if towards the end you succeed in bam-
boozling me. But if I had my way. . .

And let us suppose the author deigns to reply: —

“But why should you? In the first place you assume that I am
setting you a problem. If you choose to identify yourself with
my detective, you are responsible for any displeasure you may
experience. At the very least, you cannot cavil at his methods or
mine. Your diatribe is neither here nor there, I do not tabulate
a aeries of theori€^ (all founded on some fraction of fact) and

Masters of Mystery 131

ask you to place them in a list of popularity and then write you
a cheque for £1000. I have my own and very excellent formula
for administering the short, sharp shock at the unexpected de-
nouement. You are being rather stupidly annoyed because you are
not cleverer than you are — that is in being able to read my
thoughts.*'

Obviously we can only have sufficient evidence when the prob-
lem is solved. The solving of the problem virtually means com-
plete knowledge of its attendant circumstances. But once given
that, there is no problem. Yet a little knowledge, though it may
be dangerous, is often a very blissful state. We are thrown on our
resources, now to hazard a guess, now to use our intuition, now
to answer the author back in his own coin. You see, the problem
is changing again. We begin to examine the author’s technique:
and here, as we shall see later, we have the slender aid of the
canons of our Muse to restrain the author's diabolical legerde-
main. We have now really two problems,

(1) How is the author in the habit of disposing of his problems?

(2) How can we apply this knowledge to the problem in hand?

In one sense the problem is thus not a problem at all, but a

host of problems depending on knowledge not only proper to the
mystery but also extraneous to it. In another sense it is not
strictly a problem at all, but a piece of grand bluff. Even al-
though we can spot the villain, we cannot know the steps. There
are mercifully, however, degrees of probability which serve as a
guide to the solution; and we do emphatically regard them as a
satisfactory substitute. We scrap the intermediate steps and boast
we are in at the kill.

# # #

Let us now turn our attention to the other principal element
in the detective story, which has been labelled “the sensational
element,” but which, owing to the base connotation of that term,
you may prefer to call the romantic or even the artistic element.
Mental gymnastics are not sufficient to warrant the widespread
popularity of our genre. Jaded business men or imaginative office
boys are not so keen as all that on mind culture. The puzzle can
be overdone, and it is fatal to deprive it of its trappings. Thus

152 H. Douglas Thomson

The Baffle Book by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay, and sim-
ilar volumes, are only for the distracted host when the guests are
proving troublesome. Herein the crime and the data are pro-
vided, and one has merely to take a pencil and '‘furiously to
think’' — or crib by looking at the end of the book (upside down),
One ingenious firm of publishers, putting their shirts on human
nature, tried out a scheme whereby they sealed up the latter half
of their mystery stories, and undertook to refund the money for
the book if the reader returned it to them with the seal intact.
Such is the puzzle fever!

But we must have some more primitive attraction, to serve as
an antithesis. This we find in the setting, which is painted at
times with an imagination so indifferent to fact and possibility
that it reduces the total result to a lurid chaos. In this respect the
detective story has just outgrown the penny dreadful. Mountains
do not divide Sherlock Holmes from Sexton Blake. But where
the penny dreadful rushes in, our Muse is well advised to tread
warily. Excitement may be had without the wholesale dissipation
of anarchy, and romance without its toll of victims. Mr. Chester-
ton has boldly called the atmosphere of this setting "the poetry
of modern life,” It is unnecessary to dwell on its familiar effects —
the dangers lurking in darkened alleys; the mystery of a large city
at night; the secrets and the tragedies it harbours; the perpetual
all but annihilation of law and order; the hero-detective as the
saviour of society.

It is merely a recognition of dramatic values. Take first of all
the character of the villain. Our writer of detective fiction is
naively emphatic in his repetition of the fact that his detective’s
opponent is no "common crook.” And so with a gay will he sets
out to people the world with Calibans turned geniuses, whom a
streak of madness debars from becoming the legislators of the
world. It is not so much an attempt to make some begrudging
allowance for evil — ^to which after all he is professionally indebted
— that induces our author to depict these arch-fiends as art col-
lectors, musicians and scientists. Rather he is for Art’s sake a zeal-
ous advocatus diaboli; he is raising evil to an artistic plane.

Mr. F. Wills Crofts in a paragraph in Inspector French and the
Cheyne Mystery pours scorn on these tales of the jeopardizing of

Masters of Mystery 133

civilisation; of gunpowder plots; of stolen plans; of the discovery
of deadly poisons; of the “Napoleons of crime” sitting in their
spiders’ webs, spreading out their “vast tentacles” — the while they
plan delirious dreams of harnessing world power. But so often do
we stumble in the dark on lonely mansions which hold some dia-
bolical secret, so often are we held close prisoners by their desper-
ate denizens, and such relish do we take in our predicament, that
we cannot — to be honest with ourselves — ^welcome Mr. Crofts’s
attitude. Surely the compelling reason for our delight is a sense
of the dramatic, and the higher the stakes played for, the more is
it intensified. Should, however, this explanation fail to satisfy the
realist, we must be content to submit the criterion of excitement
as a substitute. Excitement can only be rated by its degree. If the
aim of the author is merely to arouse excitement, he is justified in
choosing any means to achieve his object.

Similarly with the death of the villain. It is rightly felt bad
artistry to pack him off to the gallows- Few murderers in the de-
tective story are sentenced at the Old Bailey, and in only one story
that I have read has there been a description of the execution.
“Sapper” has confessed the difficulty which he experienced in
getting rid of Carl Peterson for good and all. An arrest as the
final event is tame; a reticent silence, implying that the Law is
“taking its course,” is unsatisfactory. The truth of the matter is
that we expect the villain to make a “good end.” He has been
responsible for some share in our entertainment. Let him choose
the manner of his death, and die “like a gentleman.” The films
have robbed him of one means of demise — the motor smash; and
Melodrama dislikes the familiar. Let us have, then, just a sus-
picion of the Old Lyceum, Where is heard the “jingle of the
bracelets,” there must there also be the “fetid breath of almonds!”

After a moment’s thought on this two-fold division of the
problem and the setting, I am induced to make a further division
on the same lines, but this time a division of the public that reads
detective stories- Like all generalisations it is only a half-truth,
but here it is for what it is worth. The average male reader reads
the detective story for the problem, the female reader for the ex-
citement of the setting. The man in the street loves a problem.
There is always an excuse to solve it round the corner. Not that

134 H- Douglas Thomson

he is too practical of imagination to snap his fingers at suspense;
but murders on paper do, as a rule, amuse rather than excite him.
His is the enthusiasm of the cross-word fiend, as it were, spread
out a bit.

Not so with Woman. “Is it worth while?” says Miss Emanci-
pated, and in her earnestness stays not for any answer. Is there
love? And we must confess there is more cupidity than Cupid.
Is there fashionable controversy, religious, social or sexual? And
we are shamed into admitting that the only kind of controversy
she will be likely to find will be between an ‘“impossible creature”
and a stupid policeman on the properties of red sandstone. Not
a triumphant emergence from the inquisition.

Well, we can be superior and blame the inquisition. One can
blame Woman’s proverbial illogicality, and say she has not the
patience to argue out the problem. Personally, I often wonder
which attitude is the more enjoyable, that of the active partici-
pator or that of the passive spectator — ^in view of the nature of
the problem. As far as my own experience goes that peculiar
property of woman, intuition, fails disastrously on the touchstone
of detective fiction. Even her guesses are unusually wide of the
mark — possibly because the mystery monger is too much of a ra-
tionalist to accept the myth!

But the most obvious reason for Woman’s indijfference to the
intellectual fireworks is her delight in the emotional values. To
every woman who prefers the problem there are at least four who
prefer the shocker. Woman loves to be thrilled and to have her
knees banging each against either like one of Mr. Frankau’s hero-
ines. The doubting Thomas I would advise to go to a cinema
where a mystery film is being screened or to a theatre where a
crook drama is being staged, and to listen if he has not the in-
decency to watch. Perhaps there is some other less stupid reason
for these gasps and sudden twitchings. If there is, I congratulate
these victims of hysteria, and envy their escorts.

# # #

it is time in parenthesis to say a few words about murder. I
have been assuming all along that the proper subject of detection
in literature is murder, as being the consummation of crime;

Masters of Mystery 135

while all other forms, theft, blackmail, larceny, arson, abduction
and the like should scarcely come within its province, as not merit-
ing ‘'the grand manner.” This may appear heresy in view of the
paucity of murders in the Sherlock Holmes tales; but, it should
be remembered, we have here to deal with just these artistic and
dramatic values to which reference has been made. From an
aesthetic point of view, the theft of a Rajah's diamond remains
a base act, on a par with the pilfering of a string of Giro pearls.
With murder it is diifferent; we are on a higher plane. “The base
element,” wrote Schiller of murder, “disappears in the terrible.”
Where there is no murder, it almost seems like wasting the detec-
tive’s valuable time.

Van Dine is reported in an interview to have said that he con-
sidered “murder” the strongest word in the English language.
No other word was “so dramatic, so gripping, so compelling.” For
that reason he uses it in the title of each of his books!

On the subject of murder it is well to go back to De Quincey.

“People,” he says, “begin to see that something more goes to the
composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be
killed — a knife — a purse — and a dark lane. Design, grouping,
light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable
to attempts of this nature.” And again:

“The world in general are very bloody-minded; and all they want
is a copious effusion of blood; gaudy display is enough for them.
But the enlightened connoisseur is more refined in his taste.”

Here, then, we have a beginning; and for the rest — exit in
mysterium. We must have a murder and it must be well done.
As enlightened connoisseurs the question, What constitutes a
good murder? must give us pause. Obviously the more artistic a
murder, the more artistic in one sense will be the detection of the
murderer; for the artistry of a murder involves to some extent the
immunity of the murderer from detection. Now, despite this cor-
respondence of aesthetic values, the principles determining the
murder perfect per se^ and those determining the perfect murder
of detective fiction are somewhat different, just as the latter dif-
fers, for example, from the ideal press murder.

In his rulinp on the “principles” to which the man of sensi-

igG H. Douglas Thomson

bility looks in gauging the artistry of a murder, De Quincey gives
us three heads, (i) the kind of person murdered; (2) the place
where, and (3) the time when.

(1) As regards the first, he considers that the murdered man
should not be a villain, and follows with the attractive corollary
that he should not be a public man either. His former argument
is this. If the murdered man be a villain it is just possible that
he was himself contemplating murder when he was struck down.
This robs the murder of all its pathos. Now the interest of the
writer of detective fiction in the morality of the murdered man
varies according to his purposes. For example, he may argue
thus: —

“I shall be conventionally simple. I shall increase the reader’s
desire to have justice done by appealing to this preliminary pathos
— ^parent of vengeful wrath. I shall, therefore, stress the unim-
peachability of the victim’s morals. The trick always works in the
magazines.”

Or he may argue thus: '‘A railway journey or a Saturday night
are not the most fitting occasions for an indulgence in pathos.
My reader is likely to have as little pity for my victim as I have
myself — and I have none. Supposing on the contrary I renounce
pathos, and make my murdered man a thorough scoundrel, what
can I gain in this equation? Why, I shall simply float on motives.
My characters will vie with each other to have the glory attached
to them of ridding the world of a pest to society. I can also work
out a happy ending, and incidentally collar the film rights.”

Or he may argue in yet another way: “I shall trade on the old
crux of morality and its semblance. I shall bestow the mythical
ring of Gyges on the corpse. Thereby I shall cultivate my reader’s
righteous indignation, while flummoxing him as to the motive.
Then, at my own pleasure, I shall turn the tables.”

(2) Place where. Most writers have a preference for staging
their murders in the library. It is dignified; it is homely. The
corpse sits bolt upright at the desk, or sprawls over the blotting
pad. The library incidentally opens on to a verandah. The fold-
ing windows are locked. A Virginia creeper climbs up the walls
outside. Corpses have occasionally been stowed submensa; but
such humour on the part of the murderer can only be regarded

Masters of Mystery 137

as rather coarse. Cupboards form convenient receptacles, and
bathrooms, had it not been for the French Revolution, would
have had their points. A murder in a railway carriage leaves too
much to chance, and the space is abominably confined.

The murder in a detective story should come unexpectedly;
unexpectedly that is to those concerned. It should also be com-
mitted in the last place in the world you would expect it to be.
Thus, a murder in the grotesque place has additional virtue. It
surprises, it amuses, it takes us by storm.

Imagine a murder in a music shop, in Selfridge’s bargain base-
ment, in a parish hall, at the Grocers’ Exhibition. After all the
golf course takes some beating. It is an ideal depository. And what
a joy to lay a corpse dead on the pin at the sixteenth. Some noble
souls go through life with the fervent desire on their lips that
when their day comes they may be taken away after a daisy down
the fairwayl Indeed, if the writers of detective fiction consulted
the wishes of some of their victims, the golf course would be much
more popular even than it is at present as the setting.

(3) As regards time when and other circumstances De Quincey
has little to say. '‘The good sense of the practitioner has usually
directed him to night and privacy” — a sentiment with which we
are probably in agreement. In this category we must include also
the means; the motive; the attendant circumstances; the presence
or more likely the absence of witnesses — all the facts material to
the unravelling of the plot. Naturally, the means and the motive
are the most important. Miss Sayers has given us an attractive
list of the "unexpected means” — "poisoned tooth-stoppings, shav-
ing brushes inoculated with dread disease . . . poisoned boiled
eggs . . . electrocution by telephone — ^hypodermic injections
shot from air guns.” But novelty’s reign is usually short-lived,
and the day of secret African poisons has passed. Of the motive
it would be safe to premise that it should be (1) natural, and (2)
adequate. It should spring from the primary and elemental emo-
tions of jealousy, envy, fear, covetousness and the like, and the
murderer should have some cause however slight for harbouring
these passions. He should not, for example, commit murder for
the fun of it, or from some trivial pique. Van Dine makes the
following catalogue of primary motives for murder (1) murders

igS H, Douglas Thomson

for profit; (2) murders for jealousy; (3) murders for revenge; (4)
murders for ambition; (5) abnormal sex murders.

Well, we have made some progress. We have decided to have a
murder. And let us have no beating about the bush, no subse-
quent disappearance or resuscitation of the corpse. That would be
gross anticlimax. Father Ronald Knox should really have known
better in Footsteps at the Lock, Further we shall probably agree
with Macbeth — though we disregard his hypothesis — that

Twere well it were done quickly.’'

Mr. Bancroft’s long and halting proem to the murder in the
book version of The Ware Case tends to destroy our interest in it
when it does come. Logically, the murder is the First Act, and the
greatest economy can be used in the so-called “creation of at-
mosphere,” for the reader is already keyed. Whoso considers the
detective story beastly and morbid can put that in his pipe and
smoke it. Notice how Mr. Chesterton goes to work in “The Three
Tools of Death”: —

“But there came out of him a cry which was talked of after-
wards as something unnatural and new. It was one of those shouts
that are horribly distinct even when we cannot hear what is shouted.
The word in the case was ^Murder.’ But the engine driver swears
he would have pulled up all the same if he had heard only the
dreadful and definite accent, and not the word.”

The unity of the plot should not be destroyed by a succession
of murders. It is repulsive to the “enlightened connoisseur” to
have to

“Look on the tragic loading of this bed.”

We may, indeed, grant the criminal a score of murders to his
credit; the more the merrier, provided our evidence for them is
mere hearsay. Even in a life of crime distance lends enchantment.
But a repetition of murders within the scope of a single plot, as
in Mr. Arthur B. Reeve’s The Exploits of Elaine or Mr. Edgar
Wallace’s The Green Archer , is monotonously episodic. It is, as
Mr. Darlington would say: too “bloomin’ ’olesale.”

Masters of Mystery 139

We have discovered two ingredients in the detective story — the
problem and the setting. We started the ball rolling by positing
the perpetration o£ a satisfactory murder. We have now to fill in
some of the details. Three main emotional elements are distin-
guishable in the detective story — the elements of excitement, of be-
wilderment, and of surprise. Of these the first is common, but in
a variety of degrees, to all fiction. In the detective story it ought
to be at white heat. The quick development of the plot, the inter-
play of the characters, the lurid background, the final solution of
the mystery with the detective’s triumphant Eureka, all contribute
to this effect. The element of bewilderment is caused obviously
by the nature of the problem. We cannot tell at once who the
murderer is. Even if we claim to have intuitional powers, we shall
experience some difficulty in finding a satisfactory motive for the
murderer. This bewilderment of ours, be it added, is not always
appeased and satisfied as the writer considers it ought to be. As
regards the element of surprise the detective story may claim an
advantage over fiction in general. Fiction, like government schemes,
tends to work out according to plan; its conclusions are for the
most part foreseen because they are the natural outcome of char-
acter and circumstance. In the detective story the important char-
acters are not usually labelled, and the circumstances are shrouded
in mystery, so that the unexpected is always happening. Unex-
pected, only in the sense that we have nothing to inform us of
what is likely to happen next.

How is the plot evolved? Common sense will tell that it is
bound to be a painstaking process, a putting together of a jig-saw
puzzle, rather than the sudden spontaneity of the poet — the sub-
lime unity of form and matter, and so forth. It is a cold, calculat-
ing business, cruelly selective — ^for the author has to choose be-
tween a number of roads all leading to the same place and of
more or less equal length and gradient. And in this constructive
process he has to be ever so circumspect or his edifice will begin
to wobble, or — to change the figure — ^his cat will come tumbling
out of the bag. Disparage, if you will, the limitations of his art,
his meanderings in the labyrinth of the plot with the Minotaur of
the Obvious, Sensationalism and his other enemies awaiting him
at every corner.

140 H. Douglas Thomson

Mr, John Buchan in The Three Hostages has suggested what
must strike one as a singularly happy-go-lucky method for plot
construction. The author takes a certain number of incongruous
subjects — a Jew’s harp, let us say for the sake of argument, a
potato patch and a steam roller, and he then proceeds to establish
a connection between them. A prolific writer of detective fiction
naively admitted that his inspiration was due to his typewriter.
So long as his fingers grasped the pen in the approved style his
mind simply failed to function, but as soon as ever his fingers felt
the keyboard, inspiration came to him simply oozing thousands
of words. I have heard, too, of an author who constructed so mys-
terious a problem that (when the time came) he could not for the
world solve it himself. Generally speaking it seems reasonable to
suppose that the average detective story writer must start with one
(supposedly) original idea which he proceeds to work up — this
idea in eight cases out of ten being concerned with the actual per-
petration of the crime. The process of detection will then be built
up backwards. This is naturally a point which we shall have to
discuss in greater detail in particular instances.

Be that as it may, the solution of the plot consisting virtually
in the shifting of the relative position of the characters to each
other in the light of the murder, it is the author’s business to try
to screen the criminal for as long as possible, and thus to con-
tend with the reader’s powers of identification by drawing before
him a continual stream of red herrings. It is his business, for that
is what his public expects of him. And what delight his public
derives from its realisation now and again that they are red her-
ringsl And what self-gratification in the boast, “You can’t hood-
wink me!” The author, recognising his public’s perspicacity, can
afford to be patronising and to give it some rope provided only
he can deceive it over the final issue. But to the Red Herrings —
specious and alluring — our writer must pay his court.

Let us take A, B, C, D, as four principal characters amongst
whom our suspicions may be equally divided after the murder.
The commonest procedure is what is known as double bluff or
double-cross. A is made to attract our suspicions first; next B
and C temporarily appear as potential criminals; then D, who
has hitherto been eating his eggs and bacon, and been behaving

Masters of Mystery 141

in an exemplary fashion, is most foully incriminated. And when
we imagine his guilt is all but confirmed, back we go to the laugh-
ing unsuspected A. This is a scheme to which most detective story
writers have at some time or another a very strong leaning. Of
course, even with four principals several variations are possible.
A, as often as not the family lawyer, may caper genteelly in the
foreground during the whole of the action while B, C and D are
in turn made his scapegoats. Suspicion should be fairly evenly
distributed. The more pigs in pokes that the author carries about
with him the more fun for the reader. But when one or two char-
acters get more than their proper share of suspicion — ^well, it be-
comes too patently obvious. When we speak of these suspects, it
should be borne in mind that they may either be characters who
are in a temporary disgrace to suit the author’s purpose, or on the
other hand those who for all their sheep’s clothing do look un-
conscionably like wolves. So, if the author is as ingenious as Mrs.
Agatha Christie, he can play a double game with the reader by
establishing a subtle intercommunication between the sheep and
the wolves travelling incognito to the forest and the fold.

I must say I have a special liking for those tales where one’s
field as a reader is to some extent determined and marked down.
Supposing the circumstances make it necessary that the murder
was committed by one staying in a certain house, one’s attention
is thus focused on a fixed number of people. This narrowing
down of the possibles serves in a curious way to make the puzzle
harder. You no longer try to reason on the assumption that any-
thing is possible, but to choose out of a number of possibles the
right solution.

It is with certain misgivings that I now proceed to attempt to
summarise from the main trend of detective literature the phases
of the action of the orthodox plot. The following structure is not
intended to be in any way either a necessary or an exemplary
one. It is only a typical one, and, from being typical, naturally
a successful one,

(1) Murder most foul!

(2) Introduction of the characters. First suspects, these being
either {a) the author’s red herrings, or (b) those tf^^aracters whom
the reader suspects intuitively.

H. Douglas Thomson

142

(3) The Inquest.

(4) Clues and False Trails. The investigation carried out by
the police (or less often by a bombastic amateur) fails.

(5) Impasse.

(6) The detective “takes up the case;” his novel line of investi-
gation.

(7) New Suspects; i.e. those characters whom the reader is sup-
posed to conclude that the detective suspects. In reality, of course,
the latter suspects somebody quite diiBEerent.

(8) Denouement. The detective's Eureka.

(9) Explanations.

The eleventh hour denouement is the most satisfying. Mr. E. C.
Bentley’s Trent* s Last Case shows with what effect the denoue-
ment may be delayed. An explanation covering thirty or forty
pages, either going over old ground or consisting of an archaeo-
logical research into ancestral crooks and crimes, is intolerable
anticlimax.

# # #

Criticism is at bottom a statement of personal feelings of ap-
preciation or of censure. But it involves something more, and
hereby criticism saves its face. Our feelings must be accounted for,
attributed to certain elements in the work criticised. This is noth-
ing else than the realisation of a code of rules to which the work
under consideration must in general conform. Now it is a fair sub-
mission that the stricter the rules and the more stringently they
are enforced, the higher will be the standard of play. If we ad-
mit this — as presumably we must — it will not be difficult to show
that the detective story has a just claim to be a work of art.

To the methods of treatment in the detective story there seems
no limit. The mystery may be left — if solved — ^yet unfinished, as
in Mr. J. S. Fletcher’s The Mysterious Chinaman. The detective
may prove to be the criminal — z. fashionable variation at the pres-
ent time. Again the murder may turn out to be no murder at all,
but a hoax. The story may even be told by the criminal, so that
as far as the reader is concerned there is no mystery. An infinite
number of variations is possible, yet I insist that there is, and must

Masters of Mystery 143

be in the better detective stories, this common adherence to a set
of rules.

I do not wish to be saddled with the task of tabulating these
rules. For when one embarks on this task, one is immediately
aware of the distressing fact that one is merely emphasising a heap
of truisms. This is due to the fact that we take up a detective
story in a very definite frame of mind. Let me make myself a little
clearer. When we read a detective story in which there is a mur-
der, we expect to be told eventually who the murderer was, and
how he murdered his victim. We expect that all the details of the
evidence which did or did not puzzle us should be explained. We
expect also a host of other things — that the murderer shall pay
for his crime: that the detective’s theory shall be the right one:
that there shall be a detective, whatever those who consider Edwin
Drood a first-class detective novel say to the contrary. And so on
and so forth.

To put it in another way, the reader expects the writer to co-
operate with him to some extent. This question has been aptly
described as an “ethical” one. The average reader has a very def-
inite idea that the author should play the game with Jaim: and
he is instantly up in arms if the canons of fairplay are violated.
What he means by this is open to doubt. But probably, he means
that the author has solved his problem in a way in which it was
impossible for him to solve it. The whole process of detection
is based on evidence. From the author’s point of view the easiest
procedure is to give the reader evidence, evidence and again evi-
dence: for it is easier to deceive where there is a surfeit of it than
where there is a scarcity. This also happens to fit in with the
reader’s way of thinking. But if the detective should calmly pocket
a bullet that he found on the carpet without saying a word to a
soul, and then calmly proceed to reconstruct the crime from this
valuable clue, the irate reader feels bound to claim a penalty.
For had he been there he might have found the clue himself.
Similarly he feels that to keep the villain under lock and key — a
relative from abroad, a rough diamond from the colonies, whose
existence has barely been mentioned, then suddenly to bring him
to light at the denouement, is a piece of glaring insincerity. To

144 Douglas Thomson

abstain jErom recording vital evidence is a technical weakness.
Vital evidence should be placed in the shop window.

The average reader is so far justified; but, before allowing him
to have it all his own way, we should consider for a moment his
average attitude of mind in reading a detective story. In the first
place he is at liberty to, and invariably does, suspect every char-
acter in the book with possibly an exception or two. Allowing for
this fact an impartial judge might on occasion describe the irate
reader’s plea for fair-play as an instance of sour grapes. Then
again the reader is possibly familiar with the individual technique
of the author he is reading. If he is reading Mr. Edgar Wallace,
he probably sees through the attractive veneer of the villain. In
Mr. A. E. W. Mason’s yarns he is ready chercher la femme^ and
so forth. So you see the detective is handicapped in some ways. He
has got to get the better of his creator. He has on occasion to lose
his individuality without losing his identity.

It is just this discipline that justifies the consideration of the
detective story as an independent genre. For without this restraint
it merges into the other types of fiction, such as the adventure
story, the spy story, and the picaresque novel, whose structure can-
not be so clearly delineated. These other forms may bear at times
the very strongest resemblance to the detective story. It can easily
be seen that the *'hunt” or ‘"chase” theme is very much akin to
the trapper-like pursuit of the detective. E. M. Wrong saw a close
similarity between Mr. John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps
and The Power House and the orthodox detective story.

Again we may have the tale of the combat-to-the-death between
Law and Anarchy, where the forces and objectives of the two
camps are openly divulged. We note the same movements as in
the sensational detective story: attack, pursuit and capture. Only
the hares and the hounds regularly change sides.

Yet another kindred theme is where the Sword of Damocles
is held over the hero for the greater part of the book. He learns
by chance of an incriminating secret. A letter in the post asks
him politely but firmly to mind his own business. He pays no
attention to this, but is surprised to find a second warning, this
time couched in language more succinct, under his porridge plate.
Of course, he is too pig-headed not to disregard this too. Finally

Masters of Mystery 145

comes the threat of immediate annihilation. Then things begin
to happen.

As a sop to the adventurous Adam this theme is frequently in-
troduced into more or less orthodox detective stories. Sherlock
Holmes, you remember, after staging his comeback, had the very
devil of a time with the last of the Moriartyans. Hourly he stalked
in the shadow of death. But though the detective is from time
to time threatened with death, he has rarely, in the best circles,
to run the gauntlet of organised attempts at assassination. Father
Brown does not find bombs in his coal scuttle. In nine cases out
of ten, Poirot would be shocked if poisoned arrows were shot at
him through the skylight. E. M. Wrong thought that the reason
for this motif is that the criminal should give the detective a run
for his money. Rather it is that the criminal should give his read-
ing fans a run for their money, for the sedentary life of the detec-
tive is not yet out of fashion.

# # #

There remains one question which had better be answered be-
fore we come to grips with our subject. Really, it is the conclusion
of our argument. What are we to regard as the true proportion
of reason and sensation? We shall see that, historically, the pen-
dulum swings fairly evenly in either direction. There have been
thrillers pure and simple; there have also been puzzles, possess-
ing as little sensational action as a novel of Trollope’s. There
have also been hybrids, unfailingly attractive because of the com-
promise. But it was our view that the detective story must be first
and foremost a problem. The main ingredient must be logic. If
there is to be sensation — ^and we would not for worlds banish it
— ^it should seem rather incidental. All the same, there is quite
enough excitement in a problem without calling in the aid of
death, crape and flying squads. The logical detective story is the
finer form because it recognises a technique. The highbrow form
wins.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

(1933)

By Vincent Starrett

Tsiroirrinnr^ 0000000000000000000 onnnnrrcinn^^

The aQection of men of good will for Sherlock Holmes has ex-
pressed itself j in recent years, in a literature sui generis: half-
serious, half -humorous, often extravagant, hosed on the pleasant
make-believe that the king of sleuths was a man of flesh and blood.
As practiced by the Baker Street Irregulars of New York, shep-
herded by Christopher Morley, and affiliated or scion societies in
such world centers as London, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco,
Okinawa, and Akron, Ohio, this pursuit of the higher verities
has acquired the status of an original if minor biographical and
bibliographical science that may be called, for want of a better
term, Holmesiology, The studies and researches produced under
this devotional aegis are classified as Holmesiana or Sherlockiana,
or occasionally Watsoniana; the scriptures they interpret {known
in the Baker Street vernacular as The Sacred Writings) are the
narratives of John (or James) H, Watson, M,D., as transcribed for
publication by a certain Conan Doyle,

Already this harmless conceit has produced a good half-dozen
full-size volumes in England and America, not to mention an
infinite number of shorter publications. And word arrives at
press-time of the founding of a full-fledged journal, to provide
the faithful with their chosen fare at quarterly intervals.

How all this started has occasioned considerable conjecture,
which need not detain us here. The truth of the matter probably
is that the game belongs to no single individual, but to the unique
reality of Holmes himself. With all respect to such other selfless
toilers in the vineyard as Monsignor Ronald A, Knox, H, W, Bell,
S, C, Roberts, Mr. Morley, and Edgar FF. Smith, the finest flower-
ing if not necessarily the earliest beginning of Holmesian scholar-
ship occurred in the series of fond, wise, and mellow essays by

146

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 147

Vincent Starrett which were collected between covers under the
irresistible title The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, (New York:
Macmillan j 1933; London: Nicholson^ ^ 934 )^ your editor's
opinion they will never be equalled^ much less surpassed^ for
sheer imaginative delight in their subject. Dealing explicitly with
Holmes and Watson^ they contain at the same time much that
is implicit and valuable to know about the classical appeal of
the detective story as a whole.

Mr. Starrett is one of the few remaining American bookmen^
in the true sense of that word. Like Doyle before him^ his as-
sociation with Holmes seems likely to overshadow his other nu-
merous and substantial achievements, which include a number of
enjoyable detective stories of his own and some beyond-the-
average thoughtful criticism of police fiction in general. The selec-
tion chosen to represent him {and Holmesiology) in the present
volume is the title essay from his book.

p 0 0 Q 0 0 p p 0 0 0 P 0 0 0 Q QJUliULOJlP 0 0 0 0 0 0 P 0 0 0 p_ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 (UUUUl

It is, of course, notorious — we have Watson’s word for it — that
Mr. Sherlock Holmes “loathed every form of society with his
whole Bohemian soul.” The word society is poorly chosen. What
Watson — a careless writer — intended to convey was that social
life offended the Bohemian soul of his companion; in consequence
of which emotion he preferred to spend his time in Baker Street
when others might have gone to teas and parties: “buried among
his old books,” as Watson says, “and alternating from week to
week between cocaine and ambition — the drowsiness of the drug
and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.”

In time, it is true, the doctor weaned him from the drug — to
the detriment of romantic interest, whatever the benefit to
Holmes — but even then it is seldom that one finds the saturnine
detective accepting or turning down an invitation. He simply
didn’t get them. No doubt there had been plenty of them in his
youth; but in the face of his consistent declinations — after an ex-
perience or two, perhaps, with bores — ^he would in time, of course,
be let alone. It is, one fancies, almost as great a nuisance to be

148 Vincent Starr ett

a detective as to be a doctor: there are always guests with prob-
lems to present.

The fact is, Watson too preferred the silences or the friendly
arguments of Baker Street to any attraction London had to oflEer
— a circumstance in which he is at one with his adoring readers.
Each man preferred the company of the other, and was glad
enough, no doubt, even to see a client leave the doorstep. Even,
perhaps, Lestrade or Tobias Gregson. Even, perhaps, Inspector
Stanley Hopkins; although for Hopkins Holmes had a consid-
erable admiration, and on a cold night a prescription containing
whisky.

To the casual student of the detective’s cases it may appear that
the rooms in Baker Street were always crowded. His first impres-
sion may be that of a bewildered client teetering on the rug; an
arm-chair in which the detective is curled like a Mohammedan,
smoking shag; a cane-backed chair or sofa containing Watson;
and Mrs. Hudson entering to announce Lestrade — ^whose foot-
step is on the stair. In actuality, there were long hours of com-
radely communion between the occupants. Seldom indeed did
anyone stay the night. And some of the happiest memories, surely,
of the epic history are those of Holmes and Watson living their
simple, private lives. Not Crusoe and his admirable Friday — one
had almost said his goat — ^were more resolutely at home upon
their island than Sherlock Holmes and Watson in their living-
room. They passed there some of the most felicitous moments of
their common life.

Not that they did not, on occasion, venture the Victorian whirl.
There is ample record that Holmes, at least, was fond of opera —
sufficiently so to hurry to Govent Garden, on a Wagner night,
with no hope of arriving before the second act. This was after
the successful culmination of the “Red Circle” adventure, and was
possibly in the nature of a reward. Similarly, it will be remem-
bered, after some weeks of severe work on the problem presented
by Sir Henry Baskerville, the pair went off to hear the De Reszkes
in Les Huguenots, Holmes had procured a box, and on the way
they stopped at Marcini’s for a little dinner. “Turning their
thoughts into more pleasant channels,” was the way in which
Holmes described the De Reszke adventure. A musician himself.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 149

he would naturally turn to music for rest and surcease, after a
desperate morning round with murderers. Not always was his own
violin suiBScient.

As early in their association as the celebrated Study in Scarlet
the detective had dragged his companion off to HalM’s concert,
after a triumphant morning of detection at Lauriston Gardens.
Neruda was to play: “Her attack and her bowing are splendid,*'
commented Sherlock Holmes. “What’s that little thing of Cho-
pin’s she plays so magnificently?” If he really expected Watson
to answer him, the suggestion is clear that the doctor also knew
something about music. And luncheon, of course, immediately
preceded Neruda. Both men, without being gluttons, were fond
of eating, and frequently they posted off to some favourite Lon-
don restaurant. After the hideous comedy of the “Dying Detec-
tive” it was to Simpson’s they went for sustenance, however; not
Marcini’s. Possibly it seemed a better place to eat when food in
quantity was what was needed. Holmes, it will be recalled, had
been at that time fasting for several days.

# # »

St. James Hall was also a favourite sanctuary when it was pos-
sible for Holmes to interrupt his sleuthing. “And now, Doctor,
we’ve done our work; it’s time we had some play,” one hears him
cry to Watson, after a brilliant morning of deduction. “A sand-
wich and a cup of coffee; then off to violin land, where all is
sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed
clients to vex us with their conundrums.” The occasion of this
pleasant interlude was the intermission, as it were, before the
“crash” in the fantastic problem of Mr. Jabez Wilson. And all
that afternoon, the doctor tells us, “he sat in the stalls, wrapped
in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long thin fingers
in time to the music” — listening to Sarasate play the violin.

The picture galleries, too, it must be assumed, were browsing-
spots attractive to the collaborators. No doubt they served as stop-
gaps in the long days of criminal investigation — ^when it was pos-
sible pleasantly to while away an hour while waiting for an ap-
pointment. A clue to this diversion is to be found in the early
pages of the Hound; after the profitable discovery of the bearded

Vincent Starrett

150

man, in Regent Street: “And now, Watson, it only remains for us
to find out by wire the identity of the cabman . . . and then
we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture-galleries and
fill in the time until we are due at the hotel.” But the incident
was not, we may be sure, an isolated one. The mind turns easily
at such times to the familiar groove. Did they, one wonders, care
for Mr. Whistler? Or was “The Charge of the Scots Greys” more
to their British taste?

It is quite clear, at any rate, that the occasional social exercises
of the two were largely cultural. When they went forth from Baker
Street, it was upon a trail of evil import or to a place of decent
entertainment. Occasionally, to a Turkish bath; and very likely
— one suspects — now and again to Madame Tussaud’s. On the
whole, however, they preferred to stay at home. Away from it,
the detective’s temper was always uncertain, Watson tells us:
“Without his scrapbooks, his chemicals, and his homely untidi-
ness, he was an uncomfortable man.”

From time to time they travelled on the continent, not always
on the business of a client; and several parts of rural England
knew them well. It was on one of these joint vacation jaunts that
they chanced upon the ugly business of the “Reigate Squires” —
when they were the guests of Colonel Hayter, down in Surrey;
and it was presumably a holiday adventure of a sort that furnished
them the instructive problem of the “Three Students” — a sort of
pendant to Holmes’s laborious researches into early English char-
ters, Again, it was a vacation trip that took them — in 1897 — to the
small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the
Cornish peninsula, in which singular and sinister neighborhood
there befell that gruesome experience chronicled by Watson as
“The Devil’s Foot.” Once, it is certain, they went to Norway; but
if aught of criminal interest developed during the visit, it has yet
to be reported.

From these vacation trips — ^interrupted as they invariably were
by theft or murder — Holmes always returned to Baker Street re-
freshed. It was, however, only the thefts and murders that con-
soled him for the time thus spent away from Baker Street.

And it is at home, in Baker Street, that one likes best to think
of them — ^alone and puttering with their secret interests. Little

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 151

vignettes of perfect happiness, wreathed in tobacco smoke and
London fog.

Of course they took in all the daily papers, and read them with
a diligence almost incredible. Did the detective prop his journal
against the breakfast sugar bowl? And did Watson, when he sat
down at table, invariably thump his knee against the leg? For
Watson, at any rate, there was usually a lecture. . . . After the re-
turn from Switzerland — by way of Lhassa — the papers rather dis-
appointed Holmes. With Moriarty dead, London, from the point
of view of the criminal expert, he said, had become a singularly
uninteresting city. . . . “With that man in the field one's morn-
ing paper presented infinite possibilities. Often it was only the
smallest trace, Watson, the faintest indication, and yet it was
enough to tell me that the great malignant brain was there, as
the gentlest tremors of the edges of the web remind one of the
foul spider which lurks in the centre. Petty thefts, wanton assaults,
purposeless outrage — to the man who held the clue all could be
worked into one connected whole. To the scientific student of
the higher criminal world no capital of Europe offered the ad-
vantages which London then possessed. But now — 1”

One sees the pile of papers growing in a corner, mounting up
toward the gasogene and pipe-rack, till in a fit of energy Holmes
scissored them to fragments. That rid the room of papers, for
the nonce, but presented the new problem of the clippings: there
were probably thousands waiting to be pasted up. And then, an-
other night, another burst of energy, and some hundreds would
at length be docketed. Over the years the row of scrapbooks
lengthened on the shelf. Cold winter evenings or rainy nights of
autumn were likely to be dedicated to the pasting-up; sometimes
to indexing what already had been pasted. A never-ending chore.
When and if ever the British Museum shall acquire the scrap-
books of Mr. Sherlock Holmes one hopes to read the volume un-
der V — a fascinating miscellany. The Voyage of the “Gloria Scott"
is there, and a biography of Victor Lynch the forger. Also the case
of Vanderbilt and the Yeggman — unchronicled by Watson — ^and
somewhat concerning Vittoria the circus belie. Vigor, the Ham-
mersmith Wonder, too; and Vipers — ^possibly Vodka — and a Dra-
culian paper about Vampires. . . .

Vincent Starrett

152

Holmes obviously had a system of his own. Most scrapbook
makers would simply have listed Lynch and lizard under the letter
L, letting it go at that. But the detective indexed his clippings to
the last adjective and adverb.

# * #

The relationship between the collaborators was ideal, after the
years had taught them to know each other. About his own share
in the partnership Watson had no illusions; but he was not too
servile. Some thousands of his readers, he must have known,
would happily have traded places with him. His statement as to
himself and Sherlock Holmes, candidly prefixed to the adventure
of the “Creeping Man,*' is admirably lucid and not a little pene-
trating: “The relations between us,’' he asserts, “were peculiar.
He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I
had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin,
the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others
perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a
comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some re-
liance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was
a whetstone for his mind, I stimulated him. He liked to think
aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be
made to me — many of them would have been as appropriately
addressed to his bedstead — ^but none the less, having formed the
habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register
and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness
in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-
like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and
swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.”

During the day, when no active occupation offered, Holmes
smoked his pipe and meditated. With a case on hand, he also
smoked and meditated. Sometimes — the picture is famous — he
would sit for hours “curled up in the recesses of his shabby chair.”
Sometimes, in search of information, he “sat upon the floor like
some strange Buddha, with crossed legs, the huge books all around
him, and one open upon his knees.” Obviously, the nature of the
problem offered for his solution had an important bearing on his
habits. Sometimes “a formidable array of bottles and test-tubes.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 153

with the pungent cleanly smell o£ hydrochloric acid” would tell
the doctor — hastening in, himself, after a session with his patients
— that he had spent his day in the chemical work which was so
dear to him.” Sometimes, horizontal upon a couch, wrapped in
a purple gown — '‘a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right,
and a pile of crumpled morning papers . . . near at hand” — the
doctor would discover him in rapt examination of a hat which
was for the moment an intellectual problem.

There is a curious glamour in the most trivial passages between
the two, a sense of significance — of impending revelation — ^per-
haps not always justified by the detective s disclosure. It is part
of Watson’s charm that he sets down everything. One would not
have it otherwise. The little triumphs that are no part or parcel
of the tale are his habitual prolegomena; they are our glimpses of
that private life they lived together, when only the reader’s eye
might spy them out. . . .

“Sherlock Holmes,” one genuinely thrills to hear, “had been
bending for a long time over a low-power microscope. Now he
straightened himself up and looked round at me in triumph. 'It
is glue, Watson,’ said he. 'Unquestionably it is glue. Have a look
at these scattered objects in the field!’ ”

Actively engaged upon a malodorous bit of brewing, “his long,
thin back curved over a chemical vessel” and his head sunk upon
his chest, the detective looked to Watson “like a strange, lank
bird, with dull grey plumage and a black top-knot.” There is no
need to illustrate the scene. But this would be, of course, upon
a day when Holmes had put on his dressing-gown of grey, instead
of the more familiar purple horror. On the whole, the picture
that Watson has most vividly conveyed is that of Holmes recum-
bent — languid yet somehow rigid in his chair, wreathed in the
vapours from his favourite pipe. The favourite pipe, of course,
being subject always to change; since nothing, as Holmes himself
remarked, has more individuality than a pipe, “save perhaps
watches and bootlaces.” For every mood in Baker Street there
was a pipe. One sees him still as Watson saw and described him
in that last of all the series of adventures. . . . “Holmes lay with
his gaunt figure stretched in his deep chair, his pipe curling forth
slow wreaths of acrid tobacco, while his eyelids drooped over his

Vincent Starrett

154

eyes so lazily that he might almost have been asleep were it not
that at any halt or questionable passage of my narrative they half
lifted, and two grey eyes, as bright and keen as rapiers, transfixed
me with their searching glance.”

One notes with interest that Holmes's eyes were grey. It is the
only record of their colour.

# # #

Occasionally, when the day was really fine, the friends walked
in the streets, savouring the singular sights and sounds of London.
Shop windows were of interest to them both, and passers-by ab-
sorbing. “The park” — some park or other — was close at hand, and
it is of record that they sometimes strolled there. Watson's ac-
count of one such episode is subdued. . . . “The first faint shoots
of green were breaking out upon the elms, and the sticky spear-
heads of the chestnuts were just beginning to burst into their five-
fold leaves. For two hours we rambled about together, in silence
for the most part, as befits two men who know each other inti-
mately.” But this diversion was not customary, since it encroached
on office hours. And on the afternoon described they missed a
client. “There had been a gentlemen asking for them.”

“Holmes glanced reproachfully at me,” confesses Watson.” “ ‘So
much for afternoon walks!' said he.”

The afternoons then were spent in running down their cases —
the detective's cases — not often strolling in the park. And for ail
his love of Baker Street, it may be noted, during the active prog-
ress of a case Holmes was quite capable of hiding out. It is an
interesting revelation, frequently overlooked, that Watson makes
in his account of the adventure called “Black Peter.” . . . “He
had at least five small refuges in different parts of London in
which he xvas able to change his personality.” The reference is
tantalizing and obscure. The rooms of Mycroft Holmes, opposite
the Diogenes Club, would certainly be one of them; but it would
be satisfying to know the others. At such times — ^when he was op-
erating in disguise — Holmes sometimes took the name of “Cap-
tain Basil,” the better to deceive his casual assistants and to de-
ceive and confound his unsuspecting enemies. It may be assumed

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 155

that in all of his five refuges he stored the materials of deception,
as well as quantities of shag tobacco.

Not all of the detective’s cases, though, drove him to his retreats
or to his arm-chair. Sometimes for hours — once, certainly, for a
whole day — ^he rambled about the living-room with knotted
brows, his head upon his breast, charging and recharging his
strongest pipe, and deaf to all of Watson’s questionings. These
were his bad days, when the trail was faint, and even Watson had
failed him as a whetstone.

But it was to the papers that both invariably returned. The
everlasting, never-ceasing papers. Edition after edition of them
was delivered at the rooms, probably by the stout and puffing Mrs.
Hudson, who would have them from the urchin at the door. Not
only Holmes but Watson saturated himself with the unending
chronicle of news; and they read it — it must be admitted — ^with a
surprisingly reckless acceptance of its accuracy. In America,
Holmes would have taken rione of the papers in. In America, the
papers are for the credulous Watsons.

It is at night one likes them best perhaps — the curious com-
panions. And preferably with a beating rain outside. If Stanley
Hopkins has dropped in from Scotland Yard, no matter; their
simple hospitality is as hearty as it is restrained and masculine.
They did not always save the whisky for Stanley Hopkins. Them-
selves, occasionally, good fellows, they tippled companionably.
And usually in the early morning hours, after a trying day with
thug or cracksman. Whisky-and-soda and a bit of lemon. And all
the credit gone to Scotland Yard. Midnight or very early in the
morning — the time of relaxation and revelation, while the ‘'un-
dying flame” leaps on the hearth. Holmes lifts out a glowing cin-
der with the tongs; lights the long pipe of sprightly disputation.
“You see, Watson,” he patiently begins, “it was all perfectly ob-
vious from the first. . .

In the long evenings, too, Holmes played his fiddle. Doubtless
his bowing was not comparable to Neruda’s, but it was good
enough for Watson. “Sometimes the chords were sonorous and
melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly
they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the

Vincent Starrett

156

music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply
the result of a whim or fancy,” was more than Watson could de-
termine. And when some haunting strain had charmed and
soothed the doctor — moved him to ask the name of the composer
— as like as not it would be something by Sherlock Holmes.

# # #

Then, of an evening in the depths of February, one fancies
Watson questing another tale. Permission, perhaps, to reveal an
untold problem — one of the many hinted and then withheld. The
truth, perhaps, about the atrocious conduct of Colonel Upwood,
or the peculiar persecution of John Vincent Harden. It is under-
standable that some reticence must be observed with reference
to the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca — an investigation carried
out at the personal request of His Holiness, the Pope — and in that
delicate matter arranged by Holmes for the reigning family of
Holland; but surely the time must be at hand, thinks Watson,
for the full disclosure of facts in the Tankerville Club Scandal.
That often he spoke of these to Holmes, there can be no doubt
at all. Having half promised his readers that he would some day
tell them, his position may well have seemed to him embarrass-
ing.

One sympathizes heartily with Watson. Too long has the world
awaited the adventure of the Amateur Mendicant Society — ^which
held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse
— ^and the little problem of the Grosvenor Square Furniture Van.
The case of Wilson, the Notorious Canary-Trainer, too, is a whis-
per full of fascinating suggestion; and one would give much to
read the long-suppressed adventure of the Tired Captain.

Holmes, we may be certain, listened to some urgent argument
on evenings when the doctor decided to consider his reading pub-
lic, Frequently he chided the narrator for his literary shortcom-
ings, pretended that the tales were sad affairs; but when he came
to write just two of them, himself, he changed his tune.

One can imagine them in whimsical discussion of the ifs of
their achievements — the what ifSj as it were, conducted post mor-
tem upon their cases. As for instance, after the rocket-throwing

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 157

episode in the amusing case of Irene Adler. It is impossible to
read the tale without a bit of wonderment: what if the ingenious
rocket had missed fire? Would not the whole planned sequence
have gone agley? But Watson, although he may have faltered,
never actually blundered. Holmes knew the qualities of his as-
sistant. No case was ever lost by Watson’s failure. And his reward
— ^all that he ever asked or cared for — ^was an approving word or
nod from Holmes. Did not he get them both, outside the record?
During those nights in Baker Street, perhaps? After the problem
had been solved forever — after the reader had put down the
book?

How many matters of absorbing interest must then have been
revealed! By means most dexterously disingenuous, Holmes man-
aged a glimpse of Godfrey Staunton’s telegram; and on the first
attempt. Yet he had seven different schemes, he told the doctor,
if one had failed. What were the other six?

How many, many qustions must also have gone unanswered.
Holmes was at times blood brother to the Sphinx. There is a bit
of dialogue that is in nearly all the tales. “You have a clue?” asks
Watson eagerly. The answer is immortal: “It is a capital mistake,
my dear Watson, to theorize before one has the facts.” If one
were called upon to find in literature the best inscription for a
tombstone, it would be Holmes’s cautious apophthegm. Watson
should bargain for it on his grave. For Holmes’s tombstone —
“Elementary!”

But there can be no grave for Sherlock Holmes or Watson. . . .
Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this
instant, as one writes? . . . Outside, the hansoms rattle through
the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea-
coal flames upon the hearth, and Holmes and Watson take their
well-won case. ... So they still live for all that love them well:
in a romantic chamber of the heart: in a nostalgic country of the
mind: where it is always 1895.

Murder for Pleasure

(1941)

By Howard Haycraft

TTsinnnrmimnrrTnnn^^

The first full-length American historical study devoted exclusively
to police fiction was Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times
of the Detective Story {New York: Appleton^ 1941; London:
DavieSj 1942), published in observance of the Centennial Year of
the first detective story ^ Poe's "‘Murders in the Rue MorgueT By
request of the publishers of the present volume^ the chapter from
this work devoted to Poe and his contributions ^ slightly con-
densedj is reprinted below,

Tippecanoe (and Tyler, too) had triumphed at the polls, in an
exciting spectacle of red fire and illuminated log cabins. Pigs an-
noyed visiting European celebrities in the streets of the largest
cities. Respectable burghers nodded of an evening over the verses
of Mr. Longfellow and the novels of Mr. Paulding and Mr. Simms.
Their good wives scanned the pages of Godey's, The Giftj and
The Token; the children had been put to sleep (rather readily,
one imagines) with the indubitably instructive works of Peter
Parley. ^'Society*’ danced polkas and Prince Albert waltzes, blew
its nose on its fingers, and applauded with genteel kid gloves the
rival pomposities of Edwin Forrest and Junius Booth. '‘Elegance”
was the watchword of the day. Meanwhile, enterprising trades-
men turned handsome profits in Mineral Teeth, Pile Electuaries,
Chinese Hair Eradicators, and Swedish Leeches. Still-new-fangled
steam carriages jiggled and bounced adventurously between the

158

Murder for Pleasure 159

more populous centers. The Great Western and her sister express
packets (now only two weeks the crossing) brought all the news
from abroad and the latest British romances for church-going pub-
lishers to pirate. In New York, Horace Greeley was busy found-
ing his Tribune. In the White House, his term of office but a
month old, William Henry Harrison lay already dying — carrying
with him a struggling young author’s hopes for political prefer-
ment. Mr. Brady was soon to open his Daguerrian Gallery. Mr.
Morse had forsaken his fashionable portraits to tinker in seclusion
with a queer contraption of keys and wires. And on the distant
Illinois sod a lanky young giant was riding his first law circuits.

In short — ^America in 1841.

Philadelphia was a-tingle with the pleasurable sensations of a
literary revival. Frankly commercial, often hopelessly lacking in
taste, this renaissance nevertheless wore the face of popular and
democratic revolt. The concept of “literature” for the few was
giving way to the idea of “reading” for the many. Since the days
of Ben Franklin, William Penn’s city had been famous as a print-
ing center. Now it was realizing its assets. The golden age of cheap
magazine publishing was beginning, and Philadelphia was its
American Athens. Here were printers and popular journals: the
Carey and Lea firms, Godey*s, Atkinson' s^ the Gentleman' Sj Gra-
ham's^ Alexander's, the Saturday Evening Post, the Dollar News-
paper — among many. Here were editors: Burton, Godey, Gra-
ham, the Petersons, Mrs. Hale, the “Reverend” Griswold. Here
were artists and engravers: Sully, Sartain, Darley, N eagle, and a
host of lesser names. Here were writers of all descriptions: R. M.
Bird, T. S. Arthur, Eliza Leslie, “Grace Greenwood,” Willis Gay-
lord Clark, Captain Mayne Reid, George Lippard, “Judge” Con-
rad, Henry Beck Hirst, “Penn” Smith, Jane and Sumner Fairfield,
Joseph and Alice Neal, Thomas Dunn English. And — like a stray
cock-pheasant in a sedate domestic fowlyard — Edgar Allan Poe,
age thirty-two; critic, poet, and story-teller, currently the guiding
editor of Graham's.

Tragic Israfel was now at flood tide of success and happiness.
The statement is relative and requires explanation. In return for
his editorial duties at Graham's, Poe was receiving the startling
salary of eight hundred dollars a year — more than he ever earned

i6o Howard Hay craft

before or afterward. His child-wife, Virginia, was temporarily in
good health, as was Poe himself. His salary enabled him for the
first, and only, time to provide the necessities of life regularly,
and even to add such luxuries as a harp and a tiny piano for
Virginia. Faithful, harassed “Muddie’' Clemm (Virginia’s mother
and Poe’s foster-mother, surely one of the longest-suffering and
noblest women in literary history) could smile for once as she
went about her tasks as mater-familias of the little household.
Her “Eddie’s” bulging head was full of plans for a periodical of
his own. Meanwhile, under his editorship Graham's became the
world’s first mass-circulation magazine, leaping in a few short
months from a conventional five thousand readers to an unprece-
dented forty thousand. Poe’s own writings were of a uniformly
higher standard and greater number than at any other point in his
career. The cream of them he contributed to Graham's, and they
had a large share in its success. An inspiring if unmethodical edi-
tor, as well as the most imaginative and stimulating intellect of
his time and place, Poe in his own works constantly pointed the
way to new fields.

Crime had early claimed his attention. So had puzzles. In Gra-
ham's for April, 1841, he joined them together. The terrified
dreamer of "‘The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House
of Usher” met the analytic solver of cryptograms, the astute com-
pleter of Barnaby Rudge, on common soil. The result was a new
type of tale.

It was a tale of crime, but it was also a tale of ratiocination. It
had a brutal murder for its subject, but it had a paragon of crisp
logic for its hero. It was “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

It was the world’s first detective story.

Puzzle stories, mystery stories, crime stories, and stories of de-
duction and analysis have existed since the earliest times^ — and the
detective story is closely related to them all. Yet the detective story
itself is purely a development of the modern age. Chronologically,
it could not have been otherwise.

For the essential theme of the detective story is professional de-

Murder for Pleasure i6i

tection of crime. This is its raison d'etre^ the distinguishing ele-
ment that makes it a detective story and sets it apart from its “cous-
ins” in the puzzle family. Clearly, there could be no detective
stories (and there were none) until there were detectives. This
did not occur until the nineteenth century.

Early civilizations had no police at all in the modem sense of
the word. Crime suppression (what there was of it) was a side
job of the military, with a little help from private guards. Both
relied on bludgeons rather than brains for the meager results they
achieved. Consequently, most felony went unpunished. When
malefactors grew too audacious, the handiest luckless suspect was
gibbeted, roasted, or garroted as an example; and authority was
perforce satisfied.

Such crude methods could be effective, of course, only as long
as entire nations lived under what to-day would be regarded as
martial law. As the complex way of life we call modern civiliza-
tion gradually developed, the weakness as well as the brutality of
the system became increasingly apparent. Enlightened men began
to realize that only by methodical apprehension and just punish-
ment of actual offenders could crime be adequately curbed and
controlled.

So torture slowly gave way to proof, ordeal to evidence, the
rack and the thumb-screw to the trained investigator.

And once the investigator had fully arrived, the detective story
followed, as a matter of course.

This would all seem to be sufficiently plain. Yet a curious mis-
conception regarding the origin of detective fiction has gained
currency in recent years. The foundations of this error lie chiefly
in the presence of deductive and analytical tales in some of the
ancient literatures. This ancestral resemblance (at most) has mis-
led certain otherwise estimable writers, who really should know
better, into “discovering” detective stories in Herodotus and the
Bible and kindred sources. Fascinating as this game doubtless is,
the thoughtful reader can have but scant patience with so mani-
fest a confusion of terms. For the deductive method is only one of
a number of elements that make up detection, and to mistake the
part for the whole is simply to be guilty of non distributio medii.
It would be quite as logical to maintain that the primitive pipings

102 Howard Hay craft

of the Aegean shepherds were symphonies — because the modern
symphony includes passages for reed instruments in its scores! As
the symphony began with Haydn, so did the detective story begin
with Poe. Like everything else in this world, both had precursors;
but no useful purpose is served by trying to prove that either
flourished before it did or could. The best and final word on the
matter has been said by the English bibliophile George Bates:
“The cause of Chaucer’s silence on the subject of airplanes was
because he had never seen one. You cannot write about police-
men before policemen exist to be written of.”

It is no more than fair to note, however, that the puzzle tales
which have come down to us from the comparatively advanced
Hellenic and Hebraic civilizations bear a closer resemblance to
the present-day detective story than do the puzzle tales of any
other age before modern times. This circumstance would seem to
foreshadow the sharply parallel development of the detective
story and the democratic processes, a fascinating subject in itself.

The first systematic experiments in professional crime-detection
were naturally made in the largest centers of population, where
the need was greatest. And so the early 1800’s saw the growth of
criminal investigation departments in the police systems of great
metropolises, such as Paris and London. In Paris it was the Suret^;
in London, the Bow Street Runners, followed by Scotland Yard.
The men who made up these organizations were the first “detec-
tives,” although the term itself was not used until some years
later. (According to the Oxford Dictionary the earliest discovered
appearance of the word in print occurred in 1843, but it was prob-
ably in spoken circulation considerably before that date.)

Lurid “memoirs” of the Bow Street Runners had begun to ap-
pear in England as early as 1827. And in 1829 the romantic “auto-
biography” of Francois Eugfene Vidocq, lately of the Surety,
reached the Paris book-stalls. From about 1830, therefore, it was
solely a question of time before the first avowedly fictional detec-
tive story would be written. The only surprising circumstance is
that it was written by an American, for American police meth-
ods at the time were notoriously laggard. The explanation almost
certainly rests in Poe’s lifelong interest in France and the French:
an admiration generously reciprocated by that people in later

Murder for Pleasure 163

years. For, significantly, all Poe’s detective tales are laid in Paris
and display a remarkable knowledge of the city and its police sys-
tem. Some chroniclers have gone so far as to suggest that Poe’s
‘lost year,” 1832, was spent in France; this, however, can not
be accepted without more convincing proof than has yet been dis-
covered. Other critics have ascribed the verisimilitude of the
stories to close familiarity with Vidocq’s Memoires — ^which were
also to serve £mile Gaboriau so faithfully a quarter of a century
later. That Poe was thoroughly conversant with this work there
can be no doubt. The extent of his indebtedness will be discussed
later when the sources of his detective fiction are examined in
detail.

A question of greater interest at the present point is the hu-
man paradox that led Poe — the avowed apostle of the morbid and
grotesque — to forsake his tortured fantasies, even briefly, for the
cool logic of the detective story.

Poe revealed his inner mind in his writings as have few authors
in history. And what a mental chamber of terrors that mind was!
Horror piles on horror in his early (and later) tales; blood, un-
natural lust, madness, death — always death — fill his pages and the
“haunted palace” of his brain. Why, then, this sea-change in mid-
career, this brief return to temperate realms? Certain events in
1840 had conspired to this end. Poe’s periodic jousts with his
earthly demons are too well known to need description here. They
had at least contributed to his dismissal from the editorship of
William Burton’s Gentle'nan's Magazine. This disappointment
led to additional falls from grace and, eventually, to complete col-
lapse and delirium. At length Poe awoke from the fever, weak
but clearer than he had been in months and in a distinctly “morn-
ing after” frame of mind. At this opportune moment came prosy,
kindly George Graham with his tender of a new editorship — pro-
vided the poet would make certain practical guaranties of be-
havior. A creature of extremes, Poe’s reaction was swift and typi-
cal. He would accept Graham’s offer and forswear the world of
emotion for the sedater climes of reason.

All through Poe’s fiction runs his hero— himself. In the earlier
tales the hero is a tormented and guilt-driven wretch. Now, by a
process of readily understandable rationalization, the puppet re-

164 Howard Hay craft

fleets the change in the master: he becomes the perfect reasoner,
the embodiment of logic, the champion of mind over matter. In-
stead of bathing insanely in hideous crime, the new protagonist
crisply hunts it down. He demonstrates his superiority over ordi-
nary men by scornfully beating them at their own game; by solv-
ing with ease the problems which seem to them so baffling. In
brief, he is — ^Auguste Dupin.

There is assuredly much to be said for Joseph Wood Krutch’s
brilliant over-simplification: ‘Toe invented the detective story
that he might not go mad.”

Men still read them for the same reason to-day.

Ill

Edgar Allan Poe wrote only three detective stories: “The Mur-
ders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and
“The Purloined Letter.”

A fourth tale of Poe's, “The Gold Bug,” is often carelessly mis-
called a detective story. It is a fine story, a masterpiece of mystery
and even of analysis — but it is not a detective story for the simple
reason that every shred of the evidence on which Legrand's bril-
liant deductions are based is withheld from the reader until after
the solution is disclosed. The same objection excludes still an-
other Poe tale, “Thou Art the Man,” which, in point of fact,
comes much closer structurally to qualifying than “The Gold
Bug.” But here again it is the concealment of essential evidence —
in this case the all-important factor of the bullet which passed
through the horse — that rules the story out of court. Judged by
any purely literary standards, “Thou Art the Man” is one of Poe’s
saddest debacles, for reasons which have no place here; but as a
startling prognostication of the mechanics of the present-day detec-
tive story it is fat too little appreciated. In addition to the deter-
minative point of evidence already referred to — ^surely the earliest
bona-fide employment of the favorite physical-circumstantial clue
— it is remarkable for the following “firsts,” at least as applies
to the modern tale of crime-cum-detection: the first complete
if exceedingly awkward use of the least-likely-person theme;
the first instance of the scattering of false clues by the real crim-

Murder for Pleasure 165

inal; and the first extortion of confession by means of the psycho-
logical third degree (dependent, in turn, on two lesser devices
making their earliest detective appearance, ventriloquism and the
display of the corpse). A correspondent, who prefers to remain
anonymous, declares: ‘‘My guess is that if Poe hadn’t written the
three great masterpieces, later-day critics would be doing hand-
springs over ‘Thou Art the Man’ as an amazing and trail-blazing
tour de force.” But for Poe’s single slip in withholding the vitally
conclusive point of evidence — coupled with the tale’s unfortunate
narrative style — this might still be the case. Detective story or
not, it is worth the collateral attention of all serious students of
the form equally with the more familiar yarn of Captain Kidd’s
cipher and the shiny scarabaeus.

Before leaving this brief consideration of Poe’s more incidental
contributions, it is not without some chronological importance to
note that virtually all his secondary ratiocinative efforts, including
the two tales just mentioned and his analytical treatises on Barn-
aby Rudge and cryptography, were written during approximately
the same years as were occupied by “The Rue Morgue,” “Marie
Rog^t,” and “The Purloined Letter.” Only the essay on Maelzel’s
Chess Player belongs to another, and earlier, period.

Poe’s three detective tales proper are remarkable in many re-
spects. Not their least extraordinary feature is the almost uncanny
fashion in which these three early attempts, totalling only a few
thousand words, established once and for all the mold and pat-
tern for the thousands upon thousands of works of police fiction
which have followed. The first tale exemplified, loosely, the physi-
cal type of the detective story. In the second, Poe reverted to the
opposite extreme of the purely mentaL Finding this (presuma-
bly) equally unsatisfactory, the artist in him led, unerringly, in
the third story to the balanced type. Thus, swiftly, and in the brief
compass of only three slight narratives, he foretold the entire evo-
lution of the detective romance as a literary form. The types may
be, and of course constantly are, varied and combined, but the
essential outline remains unchanged to-day.

Equally prophetic and embracing were Poe’s contributions to
the internal structure of the genre. In the very first tale he pro-
ceeded to lay dowii the two great concepts upon which all fic-

i66 Howard Hay craft

tional detection worth the name has been based: (i) That the
solvability of a case varies in proportion to its outx6 character.
( 2 ) The famous dictum-by-inference (as best phrased by Dorothy
Sayers) that “when you have eliminated all the impossibilities,
then, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,”
which has been relied on and often re-stated by all the better
sleuths in the decades that have followed. As for the almost in-
finite minutiae, time-hallowed to-day, which Poe created virtually
with a single stroke of the pen, only a suggestive catalogue need
be given. The transcendent and eccentric detective; the admiring
and slightly stupid foil; the well-intentioned blundering and un-
imaginativeness of the official guardians of the law; the locked-
room convention; the pointing finger of unjust suspicion; the
solution by surprise; deduction by putting one's self in another's
position; concealment by means of the ultra-obvious; the staged
ruse to force the culprit's hand; even the expansive and conde-
scending explanation when the chase is done: all these sprang full-
panoplied from the buzzing brain and lofty brow of the Phila-
delphia editor. In fact, it is not too much to say — except, possibly,
for the influence of latter-day science — that nothing really primary
has been added either to the framework of the detective story or
to its internals since Poe completed his trilogy. Manners, styles, spe-
cific devices may change — ^but the great principles remain where
Poe laid them down and left them.

As Philip Van Doren Stern has well said: “Like printing, the
detective story has been improved upon only in a mechanical way
since it was first invented; as artistic products, Gutenberg’s Bible
and Poe's ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue' have never been
surpassed.”

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” chronologically the first of
Poe's detective stories, was called in the original draft “The Mur-
ders in the Rue Trianon Bas,” but happily the more “suggestive”
title (to quote a contemporary writer) was substituted before pub-
lication. The circumstance must surely rank high among the mag-
nificent afterthoughts of literature. (How the original manuscript

Murder for Pleasure 167

was preserved by chance and rescued for posterity almost half a
century after it was written is one of the fascinating and oft-told
legends of American bibliophily, which, however, cannot occupy
us here. It has been related in print by Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach
and others.) '‘The Rue Morgue” made three principal appear-
ances in type in its author’s lifetiihe. First, in Graham's for April,
1841. Second, as the only number of a still-born cheap-leaflet series
oi The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (1843) which has become
one of the greatest rarities of Americana-collecting: published at
twelve and one-half cents, copies have sold in recent years for as
much as twenty-five thousand dollars. And third, in the 1845
Tales j edited by Evert A. Duyckinck. It was also included, of
course, in the "Griswold Edition” of the Collected Works, pub-
lished in 1850. In addition to these American publications, at
least three unauthorized French translations of the tale are known
to have appeared in the 1840’s.* In an era of international lit-
erary freebooting, Poe neither received nor expected any remun-
eration for them. It may be doubted, in fact, that the world’s first
detective story ever brought its author a penny in direct financial
return — for Poe was the salaried editor of Graham's when "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” first appeared; the 1843 leaflet and
the 1845 Tales alike were failures; f and Israfel was no more
when the Griswold collection was issued. Ironically, in the years
since Poe’s death, the tale has been reprinted with a frequency
which, under modern royalty and copyright engagements, would
have netted the ill-fed poet a sizable fortune from this single ef-
fort; to say nothing of the untold millions which have accrued to
his imitators and followers.

These reprints, however, have served to make the paragraphs
of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue” thrice-familiar to every

♦For ant accurate account of this highly involved and usually misunderstood
business, see C. P. Gambiaire, The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (New
York, G. E. Stechert & Co., 1927).

fit would indeed have made little difference to Poe in any immediate financial
sense had they been successful. The terms between the author and his publishers
virtually pass belief. There is preserved a singularly pathetic letter dated August
ig, 1841, from Poe to the Messrs. 1 ^ and Blanchard, proposing (unfraitfully) a
volume of tales to include the recent ^'Rue Morgue,” in which he says: should

be glad to accept the terms you allowed me before — that is-^ou receive all profits,
and allow me twenty copies for distribution to friends”!

i68 Howard Hay craft

school-boy. The story opens with a brilliant but to-day rather out-
moded essay on the philosophy of analysis. At length the author
introduces his hero, the eccentric and impoverished Chevalier,
Dupin, and his anonymous companion and chronicler, the first
of a thousand wondering Watsons. We join in their home-life,
if their curious insistence on turning day into night may be desig-
nated by so domestic a term, and marvel dutifully with the nar-
rator at Dupin's powers of deduction. Finally and belatedly, Plot
raises its head. A hundred years of imitation have rendered the
remainder of the story so much formula: the preliminary account
of the crime; the visit to the scene; Dupin’s satisfaction with what
he finds, his companion's blank mystification; the methodical stu-
pidity of the official police; the denouement, arranged by the de-
tective; the inevitable explanation.

Made trite by numberless repetitions, it is yet singularly satis-
fying.

The reasons why “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is classi-
fied as belonging to the physical school of detective story writing
may not at once be clear — for the proportions of plot and deduc-
tion seem roughly equal in the narrative. Reader, try a simple
test for yourself. Without looking at the text, attempt to recall
the story, which in all probability you haven't read since school-
days. What details stand out most vividly in your mind? The
chances are ten to one you will form a mental picture of the mur-
derous ape clutching his victim by the hair, or some related gory
incident. Now, ask yourself; by what train of reasoning did the
detective arrive at his solution? Unless you are a specialist, the
same odds prevail that you will not be able to recall. In other
words, the story is really dominated by sensational physical event
— ^not by detection, excellently as Poe conceived it.

Poe's second detective story was distinctly a roman d clef. In
July, 1841, a beautiful young girl named Mary Cecilia Rogers was
murdered in New York under particularly involved and baffling
circumstances. If contemporary accounts may be credited, the
police bungled the investigation miserably. Poe was frankly con-
temptuous of their efforts, and more than hinted that he wrote
“The Mystery of Marie Roget” to expose their ineptitude. For
convenience he laid the scene in Paris and put his thoughts into

Murder for Pleasure 169

the mouth of Dupin. The characters were only thinly disguised,
however, and in all later publications the story has been printed
with footnotes openly identifying the actors, streets, newspapers,
and the like with their true American names. Unfortunately, the
real crime was never solved (contrary to popular misconception),
and we have no means of verifying the soundness of Poe’s deduc-
tions. The story appeared in three instalments in Snowden's
Ladies' Companion for November and December, 1842, and
February, 1843, republished in the Tales (1845)

posthumous Works (1850).*

This longest of Poe’s three major excursions into detective lit-
erature is, unhappily, the least deserving of detailed attention. It
might better be called an essay than a story. As an essay, it is an
able if tedious exercise in reasoning. As a story, it scarcely exists.
It has no lifeblood. The characters neither move nor speak. They
are present only through second-hand newspaper accounts. A good
three-quarters of the work is occupied with Dupin’s (which is to
say Poe’s) reasoning from the evidence. Only a professional student
of analytics or an inveterate devotee of criminology can read it
with any degree of unfeigned interest. Applying our simple test
again: practically no ordinary reader can relate from memory
either the facts of the crime or the steps by which the detective
reaches his rather qualified conclusion. This is the hallmark of
the too involved, too dry, too mental detective story — ^and its con-
fession of weakness.

We come now to the last, best, and most interesting historically
and bibliographically of Poe’s three detective stories.

As the 1840’s marked the beginning of the magazine age, so,
too, they denoted the crest of an earlier movement in the direc-
tion of popular literature: that now forgotten institution, the
*‘gift book” or ‘literary annual.” The gift annual was undeniably
commercial and often pretentious, and largely for these reasons
it has been slighted by purists. Yet between its gilded calf and

•The Mary Rogers legend has been retold by innumerable later writers, with
varying degrees of success, and both the crime and Poe's analysis of it have been
the subject of much and usually erroneous speculation. For a really scholarly and
reliable account of the whole matter, the interested reader is referred to a study by
William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr., of Yale University: "Poe and the Mystery of Mary
Rogers" ijeuhlications of the Modem Language Association^ March, 1941).

170 Howard Hay craft

morocco covers appeared some of the best work (as well as some
of the worst) of the leading writers and artists of the day. Its fees
were generous for the times and had the further pleasant effect
of coaxing magazine rates upwards to keep pace. And its format,
paper, typography, and “embellishments” were in the main far
above the era's drab standards of bookmaking.

The American gift annual was customarily published in the
autumn months, in advance of the holiday season, and was dated
for the following year. It is important to understand this circum-
stance, because one of the most baseless errors of contemporary
bibliography has grown up around failure to remember it: the
habit, even among eminent authorities, of assigning the initial
publication of Poe's finest detective story to Britain rather than
America.

Briefly, the history of the matter is this:

The apex of American gift-annual publishing, by common con-
sent of connoisseurs, was reached in The Gift: 184^. The product
of the Philadelphia house of Carey and Hart, this truly handsome
volume numbered among its contributors of prose and poetry
such luminaries of the era as Longfellow and Emerson (two poems
each), Charles Fenno Hoffman, Mrs. Sigourney, N. P. Willis, Jo-
seph C. Neal, H. T. Tuckerman, Mrs. Kirkland and Mrs. Ellet,
C. P. Crunch, F. H. Hedge, and others of similar prominence.
But, what is of greatest importance, between pages 41 and 61, The
Gifts purchasers or recipients could devour (as they presumably
chose to do) “The Purloined Letter,” by Edgar A. Poe, no stranger
to the buyers of Carey and Hart's gold-stamped yearly volumes.

The misapprehension alluded to has occurred because, at about
the same time, solid British heads-of-household were perusing a
sadly abbreviated version of the tale in that staunch parent of
all penny-weeklies. Chambers' Edinburgh Journal^ in its issue for
November 30, 1844. This condensation was preceded by an ex-
planatory paragraph so commonly — or wilfully — overlooked to-day
as to warrant verbatim quotation here:

‘THE GIFT'

The Gift is an American annual of great typographical excel-
lence, and embellished with many beautiful engravings. It contains

Murder for Pleasure 171

an article which, for several reasons, appears to us so remarkable,
that we leave aside several effusions of our ordinary contributors
to make room for an abridgment of it, [Italics supplied.] The
writer, Mr. Edgar A. Poe, is evidently an acute observer of mental
phenomena; and we have him to thank for one of the aptest illustra-
tions which could well be conceived, of that curious play of two
minds, in which one person, let us call him A., guesses what an-
other, B., will do, judging that B. will adopt a particular line of
policy to circumvent A. [Poe’s “article” then follows, with its title
in smaller type.]

Certainly this unequivocal language would seem to dispose for
all time of the question of priority. Yet within the present decade
a London private press has had the effrontery to reprint the Cham-
bers* abridgment as a veritable reproduction of the “first publica-
tion” of the story — significantly omitting the introductory para-
graph! (This precious bit of spuriosa even misquotes the source
of its “find”: ascribing the story to “Chambers' Edinburgh Maga-
zine, November, 1844.”) Still more puzzling is the passive support
which has been given to the same fallacy by several first-rank
American Poe-scholars, when a little obvious if tedious spade-
work to ascertain the publication date of The Gift would have
removed any conceivable doubts left by the language of the Cham-
bers* note. The qualified authorities having neglected this duty,
it falls to the present writer to report that The Gift: 184^ was
“noticed” in at least one American magazine (the Democratic
Review) as early as September, 1844; that on October 4, 1844,
the New York Tribune honored it with a laudatory first-page re-
view more than a column in length; and that its publication was
chronicled in autumnal issues of virtually all the leading Amer-
ican periodicals, among them the Knickerbocker^ Peterson's, Gra-
ham*s, and Godefs, all published many weeks before the trans-
atlantic readers of Chambers* were digesting their abridgment on
November goth. On the basis of these incontestable fects, it may
now be stated for the first time beyond any reasonable doubt that
the Philadelphia publication of “The Purloined Letter” preceded
the Edinburgh condensation by approximately two months.

Bibliography aside, this third detective story of Poe’s is far and
away the most satisfying, structurally and aesthetically, of the

172 Howard Hay craft

trio. It is simpler, shorter, more compact, more certain of itself
than the earlier two. Its quiet superiority appears from the mo-
ment it begins. Here is no delayed approach to the subject. A
few lines suffice to set the stage, and more plausibly, more nat-
urally than before. Dupin and his companion sit in their book-
closet, au troisieme (as Poe wrote it). No. 35^ Rue Dundt^ Fau-
bourg St. Germairiy '‘enjoying the two-fold luxury of meditation
and a meerschaum.’’ (How marvellously near is Baker Street!) Al-
most immediately Prefect G enters. The give-and-take of nor-

mal conversation replaces the stiff press-cuttings of the earlier tales
in revealing the essential facts of the problem. (That is, in the
American original. The Chambers' abridgment has been squeezed
almost as bloodless as "Marie Roget.”) Dupin and the Prefect end
their colloquy and the latter goes his way. A month later he re-
turns. Dupin hands him the letter and revels in his open-mouthed
astonishment. Dupin’s explanation to his bewildered comrade fol-
lows. A little too detailed, perhaps, for modern tastes ("a little
too self-evident”), it is nonetheless a true manual of detective
logic. The conclusion, moreover, has a mellow touch of humor
and humanity lacking in the previous stories. We discover a re-
luctant fondness for the originally glacial Chevalier as he thaws
to mortal vanity and malice for the first time.

To be completely fair, however, we must admit that the tale
contains also the one serious logical flaw committed by Poe in the
series. As a number of writers have pointed out, Dupin could not
possibly have seen at one and the same time (as he claimed he
did) both the seal and the address, that is to say both the front
and back, of the letter. Even apart from this, the minuteness of
his observations — ^seated as he was across the room, and peering
through green spectacles — ^bespeaks surely one of the most remark-
able visions ever recorded!

Our test must serve once more. This time the odds favor the
author. Almost every one who has ever read the story can recall
something of both essential phases — detection and event. Almost
all readers remember Dupin’s deduction that the letter was hid-
den by not being hidden at all (still a favorite gambit of the craft);
and his ruse of the staged street disturbance to acquire the docu-

Murder for Pleasure 1^3

ment (a plot-device directly appropriated by Conan Doyle half
a century later in “A Scandal in Bohemia*').

Here, at last, we have the balanced type— the detective story at
its best.

Few American authors have undergone such minute inspection
and dissection at the hands of scholarship as has Poe. Yet the lit-
erary scalpel-wielders have been strangely neglectful of the sources
of his detective fiction. Aside from the obvious identifications of
‘‘Marie Roget,” only a few minor “points" have been established.
In Pauline Dubourg, the laundress of “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue," Hervey Allen (that most readable of Poe biographers) has
discovered the name of the maiden-proprietresses of the boarding-
school which Poe attended during his boyhood stay in England.
(But no one seems to have noted the further occurrence of a
Rue Dubourg in the latter part of the tale: a repetition so for-
eign to Poe's usually meticulous workmanship as to suggest a
concealed significance.) And some scholars contend that the epi-
sode of the escaped orang-outang in the same story grew out of
a contemporary incident reported in American newspapers, while
others believe that Poe drew on similar material in Scott's Count
Robert of Paris. But one scans the academic journals in vain for
light on so intriguing a problem — for example — as the origin of
the first fictional detective's name. (Concerning Dupin's person
there is no mystery. Unless all perception fails, he can be only
Poe's mental self-portrait of the moment in French dress.)

How did Poe come to name his hero Dupin? The question may
never be finally answered, but the author left at least one impor-
tant clue when he described his Chevalier as “of an excellent, in-
deed of an illustrious family.” For the name Dupin has in truth
been a notable one in French history. The reader may, if he
chooses, discover in the standard French encyclopedias no less
than twelve prominent real-life Dupins dating from the four-
teenth century to Poe's own years, including several of the pre-
sumptive ancestors of George Sand — ^born herself, a trifle dubi-
ously perhaps, to the nom. Of this substantial number of eminent

174 Howard Hay crap

flesh-and-blood bearers of the name, two were even more out-
standing than the rest. Both were, suggestively, contemporaries of
Poe. Furthermore, they were brothers: Andr^ Marie Jean Jacques
(1783-1865) and Francois Charles Pierre (1784-1873). Andre, the
elder, was a statesman of ministerial rank who held the office of
Procureur-General and other high governmental posts for the bet-
ter part of a generation despite turbulent changes of party and
dynasty: a feat which called for no slight degree of political agility
— to employ the kindest phrase. As President of the Chamber of
Deputies from 183^ to 1840 he was at the pinnacle of his career
and consequently prominent in the native and foreign prints dur-
ing the years immediately preceding Poe's creation of his fictional
hero. Besides, Andr^ Dupin was a prolific writer on a variety of
subjects: among them, French criminal procedure. Several of his
works were translated into English; one translation, in fact, was
published in Boston in 1839. That his name was familiar to Poe
can hardly be doubted. The younger brother (commonly called
Charles) was a noted mathematician and economist who also held
public office from time to time and was created a baron for his
services. His was an even more versatile pen than Andre's, and he
was known to the English-speaking world through numerous
translations covering a wide range of topics.

Almost inescapably these brief personal histories will have re-
minded the informed Poe-student of the Minister D , the tal-
ented villain of '‘The Purloined Letter." D , it will be re-

called, was not only an accomplished and unscrupulous political
intriguant, but, as Poe made a special point of saying, a man-
of-letters as well — ^both “poet and mathematician." Moreover, he
possessed a brother who had also a “reputation in letters." The
parallel is by no means exact, and one would not wish to place
too much emphasis on what after all may have been only a co-
incidence. Yet, in the dual circumstances of Poe’s appropriation
of the name and his adaptation of the characteristics of the real
brothers Dupin, the veriest psychological tyro will be quick to
scent a highly logical, if possibly unconscious, “transference." It
is, at the least, a fascinating subject for speculation. Perhaps some
scholar of the future will uncover more specific evidence: aca-
demic hoods have been awarded for contributions less notable.

Murder for Pleasure 175

Of Poe’s indebtedness to Vidocq much has been written and
more assumed. There can be no doubt that he was closely familiar
with that worthy’s exploits and memoirs, and that he drew on
them for numerous details. But to identify Dupin, the ageless
symbol of amateurism, with Vidocq, the professional — as some
critics have done — is to commit a most uncritical error and to
miss the whole point and purpose of Poe’s ratiocinative stories.
For throughout the tales Poe hammers ceaselessly to drive home
his acutely personalized thesis of the superiority of the talented
amateur mind — ^meaning, of course, his own. Nowhere is this
more graphically brought out than in the patronizing words he
places in Dupin’s mouth near the conclusion of “The Rue
Morgue.” (This, incidentally, is Poe’s sole reference to Vidocq
in print.)

The Parisian police [Dupin is made to say], so much extolled for
their acumen, are cunning, but no more. Vidocq, for example, was
a good guesser, and a persevering man. But, without educated
thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investiga-
tions. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He
might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but
in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus
there is such a thing as being too profound.

That the entire passage is a virtual ad hoc rendering of the
quotation from Seneca which Poe later chose as the motto of “The
Purloined Letter” {Nil sapientice odiosius acumine nimio) only
shows how emphatic at all times was the distinction in his mind
between amateur and professional, between Dupin and Vidocq.

If an identification must be made: a good deal of Vidocq (or
of Poe’s opinion of him) will be found in the unflattering por-
trait of the Prefect G in the tales. As for Dupin, he can clearly

be no one but Poe — ^as Poe so obviously considered himself to
be Dupin.*

* In a late issue of The Pleasures of Publishing (Columbia University Press, April
14, 1941) tbe eminent Poe scholar, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, is quoted as saying:
[Bupin] is Poe — ^plus an eccentric French historian [named Bupin] Fve recently run
to earth, who turned day into night. I*ve been looking for such a character, found
him last August,”

176

Howard Haycraft

'‘The Purloined Letter” was Poe’s last detective story, although
he lived five more years, to the age of forty. Too many historians
have argued carelessly that he dropped the genre because it failed
to arouse sufficient interest. This is not supported by the facts.
While it is true that much of Poe’s work was relatively unappreci-
ated in his lifetime, there is no reason to believe that his detective
stories suffered more than his fantasies or his poetry. In point
of fact, the weight of evidence clearly indicates the opposite situa-
tion. Poe not only complained several times in personal corre-
spondence that the public seemed to prefer his ratiocinative tales
to what he chose to consider his worthier efforts — ^he also fre-
quently traded on their popularity in his dealings with editors
and publishers. Further, two of the three stories were accounted
important enough to be reprinted abroad, in an era when Amer-
ican literature was held in such low esteem that very little of it
crossed the water. One of them, even, was the first of his tales
to be translated into French, and appeared in no less than three
separate versions in that language before his death. And at home,
barely a decade after Poe died, young William Dean Howells
thought it significant praise to assert of a nominee for President
of the United States:

The bent of his mind is mathematical and metaphysical, and he
is therefore pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe’s
tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and
wrought out into everyday facts by processes of cunning analysis.

It is said that he suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this
author,

Abraham Lincoln subsequently confirmed the statement, which
appeared in his little known “campaign biography” by Howells
in i860 and has escaped later attention almost entirely. The in-
stance is chiefly notable, of course, for its revelation of a little sus-
pected affinity between two great Americans— utterly dissimilar
save that they shared the same birth year, and that each died tragi-
cally before his time. And it serves to establish Lincoln as the first
of the countless eminent men who have turned to the detective

Murder for Pleasure 177

story for stimulation and solace: a circumstance which also seems,
curiously, to have eluded previous mention. At its least, the in-
cident is striking evidence how broadly and powerfully Poe’s de-
tective sorcery had captured the popular imagination.

The true reasons for Poe’s desertion of the form he created are
found in his own life. After 1845 the poet’s circumstances, uncer-
tain enough at any time, became increasingly distressing. Little
Virginia died. His own end (as he must have suspected) was near.
He wrote progressively less, and that little showed a pronounced
return to his early morbidity. The last years were a nightmare of
poverty, disease, drink, and delusion. In such waking dread there
simply was no room for a “perfect reasoner.”

The final, shameful curtain fell on the tragedy in October,
1849.

To-day Poe’s position in literature is more than secure. He is
universally recognized as one of the few poets of consummate
genius America has produced, and its finest writer (if not, indeed,
the inventor) of the short story. Yet, had he published nothing but
the three Dupin tales, posterity would still award him an eminent
and merited niche in Fame’s corridors — as The Father of the De-
tective Story.

“Only a Detective Story”

(1944)

By Joseph Wood Krutch

inroTTT^rsinnroTnroTnnroTnnryir^^ ooooooooooooiy

Styles in criticism change as much as styles in the products evalu-
ated. The early 1^40* s have witnessed a spontaneous and some-
what astonishing flood of published speculation about the detec-
tive story ^ for the most part by writers and in journals usually
described by that most indefinite of adjectives^ intellectual. Al-
though these articles assume a wide variety of approaches, and
reach a comparable number of conclusions, they meet on a com-
mon note of inquiry. Reduced to its simplest terms, this inquiry
may be stated as: what makes people read detective stories? To
say that the detective story is read for ‘'escape'^ is, of course, no
answer at all; for virtually anything that is written may be read
as escape, by one man if not another. Why, then, of all the vast
amount of published writing available, do $0 many readers choose
police fiction for this purpose? Competent contemporary discus-
sions of one phase or another of this problem have appeared over
the signatures of such serious essayists as Louise Bogan, Jacques
Barzun, H. R. Hays, Mary McCarthy, George Orwell. Somerset
Maugham, and Bernard De Voto, among several. Lacking the
space for all, your editor has chosen the present essay by Joseph
Wood Krutch, from the Nation for November 2j, 1944, to rep-
resent the critical trend under discussion, as the most direct and
succinct of the available statements. Mr. Krutch is a foremost
American dramatic and literary critic and biographer, professor
of English at Columbia University, and member of the editorial
staff of the Nation for many years.

178

*‘Only a Detective Story”

The detective story, so I once assiimed, was read only by weary
statesmen on the one hand and by the barely literate on the other.
Discreet inquiry among friends and acquaintances soon revealed,
however, a very different state of affairs. It is read either aggres-
sively or shamefacedly by nearly everyone, and it must be, at the
present moment, the most popular of all literary forms. ‘'Only a
detective story” is now an apologetic and depreciatory phrase
which has taken the place of that “only a novel” which once
moved Jane Austen to unaccustomed indignation.

My own experience with the genre began with Nick Carter and
the once almost equally famous, though now almost totally for-
gotten, Old King Brady. It continued through Sherlock Holmes
and, I believe, the very first of the Mary Roberts Rinehart opera.
But it stopped there. Philo Vance and Ellery Queen were only
dimly familiar names, while Nero Wolfe was known chiefly be-
cause he was the creation of a friend and neighbor. Dorothy Sayers
and Agatha Christie attained their eminence quite unbeknownst
to me, and, so far as I was concerned, Erie Stanley Gardner wrote
in vain (under two different names) his five or six novels per an-
num. During the past twelve months, however, I have read
. perhaps 150 volumes, among which were included most of the ac-
cepted classics as well as a reasonable number of the run-of-the-
mill tales.

Even this, I realize, leaves me still a novice, and I dare speak
only because so little, relatively, has been said about so astound-
ing a phenomenon. Even those magazines and newspapers which
review this sort of writing usually do so in a special department
and thus emphasize the fact that detective stories constitute some
realm entirely apart. Would it not, for a change, be interesting
to encourage some discussion of the “detective story” in relation
to something else, to treat it as a branch of fiction or as a depart-
ment of literature, while maintaining some recognition of the fact
that branches and departments are not wholly unconnected?

Many a best-selling novel of the sort commonly regarded as re-
spectable is read from mixed motives. No small proportion of the
recent readers of, say, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Strange
Fruit read those books, in part at least, because they felt some

i8o Joseph Wood Krutch

compulsion to do so, some sense that it was a social obligation to
be able to discuss what others were discussing. But no one feels
any compulsion to read a detective story. Few discuss what they
have read with their neighbors. These books are read for pure
pleasure, and there is certainly some significance in that fact.
Pleasure is, many would maintain, the only legitimate reason for
reading any sort of belles-lettres, and it is, I would agree, at least
a sounder motive than either the desire for “self-improvement” or
an inability to resist social pressure.

Two arguments are sometimes advanced to prove that the de-
tective story must be sub-literary: its authors are sometimes very
prolific; and the stories themselves “follow a formula.” But
neither of these arguments will hold water. Copious productivity
has often been one of the most striking characteristics of the great
writers of fiction, and comparatively few of the outstanding
detective-story writers can have written more than Balzac, Dickens,
or Anthony Trollope. As for “following a formula,” it would be
more accurate to say that certain conventions tend to be followed,
and it would certainly be pertinent to ask whether this fact is
as damning as it is sometimes assumed to be. No inconsiderable
part of the great literature of the world has been written within
the limitations of an established tradition, and so written not be-
cause the authors lacked originality but because the acceptance of
a tradition and with it of certain fixed themes and methods seems
to release rather than stifle the effective working of the imagina-
tion. Perhaps instead of saying that the detective story follows
a formula we should say that it has form, and perhaps we should
go on from that to wonder whether this very fact may not be one
of the reasons for its popularity at a time when the novel, always
rather loose, so frequently has no shape at all.

Great popularity is not, to be sure, proof of literary excellence,
but excellence does often attract great popularity. Moreover, works
of art which are not good as a whole often owe their temporary
vogue to some quality good in itself, and it is surely not impos-
sible that the millions who read detective stories read them be-
cause of certain virtues more evident there than in most of the
conventionally respectable novels. And it is for those virtues that
I should like to see critics look, because I think it might be not

"Only a Detective Story'^ i8i

only interesting but instructive to have them identified. They
might even turn out to be virtues which the conventional novelist
has failed to cultivate and for the lack of which his work has suf-
fered.

To the sort of inquiry which I am proposing, the question of
the extent to which detective-story writers do or do not exhibit
certain of the virtues characteristic of the good novelist is quite
irrelevant. No one could deny the broad statement that, in some
general sense of the term, Dorothy Sayers writes very well indeed;
but neither can anyone deny that certain of her almost equally
popular rivals, write, in this- sense, very badly. The fact that Miss
Sayers is obviously a woman of cultivation and taste and that in
her best work she draws character and creates atmosphere more
successfully than do some quite respectable conventional novelists
is of course all to Miss Sayers's credit. But since other popular
detective-story writers get along very successfully without attempt-
ing anything of the sort, it is clear enough that the unique virtues
of the genre are not these. Obviously the detective story has some
characteristic appeal of its own.

The simple statement that men evidently love puzzles and vio-
lence haF been repeated so often that it has come to seem almost
meaningless, and the fact remains that if this supposedly *‘nat-
ural” taste is to be posited, one still wonders why one particular
way of satisfying it should have developed at this particular time.
Despite all that one can say about Poe and Wilkie Collins or even
Conan Doyle, who is, of course, the true begetter of the modern
manner, the contemporary detective story is rather different from
anything written before. There are some hundreds of volumes
every one of which is immediately recognizable as having been
written within a very definite period, beginning, I should guess,
about 1925, when the contemporary genre first defined itself.

A few months ago Louise Bogan, introducing the subject in the
pages of the Nation for what may have been the first time in his-
tory, suggested the ingenious theory that the essential element was
an element of dread which corresponds to a nameless sense of ap-
prehension characteristic of men living in our insecure civiliza-
tion. She suggested that this element might gradually detach it-
self and by so doing give rise to a new and terrible sort of fiction.

i8s Joseph Wood Krutch

She implied, if I understand her aright, that Mr. Queen, to take
an example, is really an unconscious Kafka or Kierkegaard
manque. But in actual fact apprehension is not by any means
evoked in all detective stories. It is characteristic of some and
serves to mark a sub-species, but the story in which the reader
identifies himself with the detective rather than with either the
criminal or his victim is at least equally common, and in such
stories dread may often be entirely absent as one follows the sleuth
in what is to him simply a matter of practicing his profession. If,
for example, Mrs. Eberhart, Mr. Hammett, and Mr. Chandler
frighten their readers, and if Mr. Gardner manages usually to
combine two formulas by personally involving his lawyer-detective
in dangerous adventures, many other of the most successful writ-
ers — S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Queen, Miss Sayers, Mrs. Christie, and
Miss Allingham, for example — usually either employ dread as a
very minor element in their effect or, by avoiding it completely,
make the detective story one of the most detached and soothing
of narratives.

Miss Bogan’s suggestion remains interesting and provocative,
but I doubt that her explanation is all-inclusive. There are, I sus-
pect, simpler, less subtle reasons why thousands go to the detective
story for some sort of satisfaction and relaxation which they find
less often in more pretentious novels, and I am wondering if it
does not commonly exhibit certain of the very elementary vir-
tues of prose fiction which the serious novelist began utterly to
despise just about the time that the detective-story writer stepped
in to steal a large section of the reading public away from him.
When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet^ it was “only a play.” When Jane
Austen wrote Emma it was “only a novel.” And while I am very
far from suggesting that any of the detective stories which I have
read are Hamlets or Emmas^ I am suggesting that the fiction writer
is in some ways better off and more successful when his public
regards the reading of his works as a dubious self-indulgence than
when the reading is regarded as a cultural duty.

Perhaps the “serious” novelist has tended to become, in some
bad sense, too serious; perhaps, that is to say, he has tended to
cultivate certain virtues and to pursue certain ends which, while
laudable in themselves, are incompatible with the primary vir-

''Only a Detective Story''

183

tues o£ fiction or, if not quite that, have at least led him to be
careless of, if not actually hostile to, these same primary virtues.
We have grown accustomed to having reviewers say first of all
that a novel is “important’* or that it isn’t, and to relegate, per-
haps to the last paragraph, an expression of mild regret that some
“important” novel or other is also structurally formless, stylisti-
cally inchoate, and pretty confusing as to intention. Even when
such criticism is not made, the terms of praise are terms which
do not necessarily imply excellence as fiction. Important novels
are commonly described as “dealing with a serious problem,” and
as being, with rather monotonous regularity, “disturbing,” “bit-
ter,” “uncompromising,” “stark.” But a novel can easily be— in
fact it very often is — all these things without being readable and
without furnishing any of the satisfactions which fiction, from the
time of Homer through at least the great Victorians, was generally
supposed to furnish.

The distinction is often made between what one “ought’' to
read and what one will enjoy reading. In connection with works
of instruction and information, the distinction is one which is
perfectly legitimate. But when it is employed also in connection
with works of belles-lettres, it is preposterous in itself and an out-
ward sign that those who permit themselves to employ it are also
assuming some real distinction between what is important and
what is interesting. But to the artist no such distinction ought to
be possible. In art whatever is interesting is, artistically, impor-
tant; and anything which seems important but not interesting is,
artistically, not really important so far as that work of art is con-
cerned. If it is important for some other artist, that artist will
make it interesting, and it might be argued that a hopeless decline
in the art of writing fiction began when the novelist willingly ac-
quiesced in a distinction between the important and the interest-
ing, I doubt that Homer or Chaucer or Shakespeare or Fielding
or Balzac or Dickens ever permitted himself such an error.

Certainly it is one of which the detective-story writer is never
guilty. He may often fail to be interesting, but he at least acknowl-
edges that when he does so he is failing utterly and unredeemedly.
And by acknowledging that fact he is driven to seek the elemen-
tary virtues of fiction as surely as the serious novelist who is con-

184 Joseph Wood Krutch

cerned only to be “important’* is led to neglect and despise them.

Two millenniums and a half ago Aristotle pointed out, first,
that the “fable” is the most important element in a work of fic-
tion, and, second, that the best fables are “unified,” by which, as
he explains, is meant that all the parts are inter-related in such
a way that no part could be changed without changing all the
others. And surely the popularity of the detective story is not un-
connected with the fact that, whereas many serious novels are so
far from exhibiting any such unity that they sometimes can hardly
be said to have any fable at all, the detective story accepts the
perfectly concatenated series of events as the sine qua non of a
usable fable. Moreover, and partly as a consequence, the form of
the detective story — that is, progress from the discovery of the
corpse to the arrest of the criminal — insures that it shall have
that self-determining beginning and that definite conclusion upon
which also Aristotle insisted. In other words, the detective story
is the one clearly defined modern genre of prose fiction impecca-
bly classical in form.

Happy endings have of course come to seem to most people not
only incompatible with “serious” fiction but also vulgar per se.
But to those who hold this prejudice — in itself one of the most
vulgar — it should be pointed out that detective stories commonly
provide that particular sort of happy ending which is the most
perfect of all and which may be described as “justice triumphant.”
Indeed, the detective story, alone of all the current forms of fic-
tion^ — except, perhaps, the “Western” — ^generally tends to distrib-
ute what used to be called poetic justice even to minor characters,
including those whose just deserts destine them to some middle
state between success and failure. And if any attempt to insist
that poetic justice must be administered in all fiction is to impose
an almost intolerable burden, the fact remains that one source
of the popularity of the detective story may be that in it poetic
justice may be achieved without obvious artificiality or improba-
bility. Dr. Johnson once observed as follows in commenting upon
those who insisted on incorporating a demand for poetic justice
among the “rules” of tragedy: “A play in which the wicked pros-
per, and the virtuous miscarry, may doubtless be good, because it
is a just representation of the common events of human life, but

''Only a Detective Story'' 185

since all reasonable beings naturally love justice, I cannot be
easily persuaded that the observation of justice makes a play
worse; or that, if other excellences are equal, the audience will
not always rise better pleased from the final triumph of perse-
cuted virtue.”

It is not, I hope, necessary for me to add that I am not claim-
ing for the detective story all possible virtues; I am not, as a mat-
ter of fact, actually claiming any except the very specific ones al-
luded to. Indeed, I am so far from urging all writers to write such
stories or all readers to read nothing else that my remarks are
really intended to be rather more about novels of a different sort
than they are about the detective story itself. The serious novelist,
it seems to me, is ill-advised either to rail against or remain in-
different to the vast popularity of what he is inclined to regard
as a sub-literary genre. I am suggesting that he might be well-
advised to consider whether it would be possible for him to in-
corporate into his own novels certain of the virtues which have
won so many readers for works which, often enough, have no vir-
tues except those which the “serious” novelist has come increas-
ingly to scorn.

>0000000 0 000 o' ooooooocfoooooootfooooooooooooo^oooooc

THE RULES OF
THE GAME

BULO 9Q 000 0 0 0 00 0 0 OOQftqO^OpOOO Oj^QtiQPPQOQOdQPOOpjJOO^

''Know the rules and when to break *em,'* says the old adage. No
one^ so far as can be recalled^ has been tempted to set down codes
of behavior to govern the love story, the Western, or the historical
novel But surrounding the 'tec — even in its less rigid shapes —
there is an element of sport, of contest between author and reader,
not found in other fictional forms that has led inescapably to the
propagation of canons of play.

Although it is the common failing of such codes that no two
authorities can agree in all details, and further that virtually every
precept laid down has been breached at some time by one or more
detective stories accepted as great, three of the better known pro-
nouncements are reproduced for the record in the section which
follows.

For whatever it may be worth, your editor once experimented

with reducing all the numerous obiter dicta on this subject to two
major commandments^ with the following result:

(j) The detective story must play fair.

(2) It must be readable.

Twenty Rules for Writing
Detective Stories

By S. S. Van Dine

IVWSnfTflTQ (To 0000000000 '0d0000000000000000000000005o6 0 000

As the creator of Philo Vance, the late S. S. Van Dine (Willard
Huntington Wright) requires no introduction here. His Credo
for the genre, reproduced below, appeared first in the American
Magazine for September ipaS and was subsequently incorporated
in the omnibus Philo Vance Murder Cases (New York: Scribner's,
1936). Stimulating as were his rules when they were first pub-
lished, it is suggested that at least Nos. 3, y, 16, and ip would need
to be liberalized or greatly modified to win any very wide ac-
ceptance today. The detective story does move!

pofiOQpqQfioooopooofi.oo.ooQQOj?poooopooj5oppQoo<20Qoooooi)oo

The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more —
it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there
are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less bind-
ing; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of lit-
erary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort of
Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of de-
tective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's
inner conscience. To wit:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective
for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and de-
scribed.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader
other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the de-
tective himself.

3. There must be no love interest The business in hand is to

189

S. S, Van Dine

190

bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn cou-
ple to the hymeneal altar.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators,
should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on
a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold
piece. It’s false pretenses.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — ^not
by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a
criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader
on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he
has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve
all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a de-
tective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather
clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty
work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his
conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more
solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of
the back of the arithmetic.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the
deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suf-
fice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other
than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of
energy must be rewarded.

8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly natural-
istic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing,
ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic stances, crystal-gazing,
and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his
wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with
the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of
metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protago-
nist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of
three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a prob-
lem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread
of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there
is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his ro-

Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories 191

deductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay
team.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played
a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with
whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

1 1. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.
This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The
culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that
wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.

12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many mur-
ders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor
helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair
of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be per-
mitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al.y have no place in a
detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is ir-
remediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure,
the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting
chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall
back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such
odds.

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must
be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely
imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the
roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy,
in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective
fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

1 5. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent —
provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean
that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime,
should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a
sense, been staring him in the face — that all the clues really
pointed to the culprit — ^and that, if he had been as clever as the
detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going
on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus
solve the problem goes without saying.

t6. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive pas-

5 . S. Van Dine

192

sages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out
character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such mat-
ters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They
hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main
purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a
successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient de-
scriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel veri-
similitude.

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the
guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers
and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of
authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating
crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted
for her charities.

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an
accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such
an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted
reader.

19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be
personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a dif-
ferent category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But
a murder story must be kept gemuetUch, so to speak. It must re-
flect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain out-
let for his own repressed desires and emotions.

20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith
list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story
writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too
often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use
them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of origi-
nality. {a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing
the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand
smoked by a suspect, (fe) The bogus spiritualistic seance to
frighten the culprit into giving himself away, (c) Forged finger-
prints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi, {e) The dog that does not
bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar, if)
The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks
exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person, (g) The hypo-

Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories 193

dermic syringe and the knockout drops, {h) The commission of^
the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken
in. (i) The word-association test for guilt. (;) The cipher, or code
letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

A Detective Story Decalogue
By Ronald A. Knox

ooooooooo'o 00000000000 00 00000

Monsignor Knox is a well-known English essayist and religious
apologist and the author of several detective stories distinguished
for their erudition and fair-play. His Ten Commandments of De-
tection, with characteristic comments laid on, are reprinted from
his Introduction to The Best [English] Detective Stories of 1928
{London: Faber; New York: Liveright, 192^).

PpOOOOOOOpOOOOOOOOOOOOOQOOOQOOOqOOOOOOOOOpOOOOOOOQOJl

1 . The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part
of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader
has been allowed to follow.

The mysterious stranger who turns up from nowhere in par-
ticular, from a ship as often as not, whose existence the reader
had no means of suspecting from the outset, spoils the play al-
together. The second half of the rule is more difficult to state pre-
cisely, especially in view of some remarkable performances by
Mrs. Christie. It would be more exact to say that the author must
not imply an attitude of mystification in the character who turns
out to be the criminal.

n. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as
a matter of course.

To solve a detective problem by such means would be like win-
ning a race on the river by the use of a concealed motor-engine.
And here I venture to think there is a limitation about Mr. Ches-
terton’s Father Brown stories. He nearly always tries to put us
off the scent by suggesting that the crime must have been done by
magic; and we know that he is too good a sportsman to fall back
upon such a solution. Consequently, although we seldom guess
the answer to his riddles, we usually miss the thrill of having sus-
pected the wrong person.

^94

A Detective Story Decalogue 195

III. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

I would add that a secret passage should not be brought in at

all unless the action takes place in the kind of house where such
devices might be expected. When I introduced one into a book
myself, I was careful to point out beforehand that the house had
belonged to Catholics in penal times. Mr. Milne's secret passage in
The Red House Mystery is hardly fair; if a modern house were
so equipped — and it would be villainously expensive — all the
country-side would be quite certain to know about it.

IV. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used^ nor any
appliance vihich will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

There may be undiscovered poisons with quite unexpected re-
actions on the human system, but they have not been discovered
yet, and until they are they must not be utilized in fiction; it is
not cricket. Nearly all the cases of Dr. Thomdyke, as recorded
by Mr. Austin Freeman, have the minor medical blemish; you
have to go through a long science lecture at the end of the story
in order to understand how clever the mystery was.

V. No Chinaman must figure in the story.

Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a rea-
son for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is
over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the
matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you
are turning over the pages of a book and come across some men-
tion of *the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo’, you had best put it down
at once; it is bad. The only exception which occurs in my mind
— there are probably others — is Lord Ernest Hamilton’s Four
Tragedies of Memworth.

VI. No accident must ever, help the detective^ nor must he ever
have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

That is perhaps too strongly stated; it is legitimate for the de-
tective to have inspirations which he afterwards verifies, before he
acts on them, by genuine investigation. And again, he will nat-
urally have moments of clear vision, in which the bearings of the
observations hitherto made will become suddenly evident to him.
But he must not be allowed, for example, to look for the lost
will in the works of the grandfather clock because an unaccount-
able instinct tells him that that is the right place to search. He

196 Ronald A. Knox

must look there because he realizes that that is where he would
have hidden it himself if he had been in the criminaFs place. And
in general it should be observed that every detail of his thought-
process, not merely the main outline of it, should be conscien-
tiously audited when the explanation comes along at the end.

VII. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

This applies only where the author personally vouches for the

statement that the detective is a detective; a criminal may legiti-
mately dress up as a detective, zsia The Secret of Chimneys^ and
delude the other actors in the story with forged references.

VIII. The detective must not light on any clues which are not
instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

Any writer can make a mystery by telling us that at this point
the great Picklock Holes suddenly bent down and picked up from
the ground an object which he refused to let his friend see. He
whispers *HaF and his face grows grave — all that is illegitimate
mystery-making. The skill of the detective author consists in be-
ing able to produce his clues and flourish them defiantly in our
faces: ‘There!’ he says, ‘what do you make of that?’ and we make
nothing.

IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not
conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelli-
gence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average
reader.

This is a rule of perfection; it is not of the esse of the detective
story to have a Watson at all. But if he does exist, he exists for the
purpose of letting the reader have a sparring partner, as it were,
against whom he can pit his brains. *I may have been a fool,’ he
says to himself as he puts the book down, ‘but at least I wasn’t
such a doddering fool as poor old Watson/

X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear un-
less we have been duly prepared for them.

The dodge is too easy, and the supposition too improbable. I
would add as a rider, that no criminal should be credited with
exceptional powers of disguise unless we have had fair warning
that he or she was accustomed to making up for the stage. How
admirably is this indicated, for example, in Trent* s Last Case!

The Detection Club Oath

“0 0 0 0 0 00 ^^©©©(fooo'o 0000 0^15 oooOooooo'oooooooooooooooodooh

The Detection Club (commonly called the London Detection
Club) was founded in 1^28 by Anthony Berkeley^ who promptly
put the organization^ thinly disguised, into his rnatchless tour de
force The Poisoned Chocolates Case. The first president (or
Ruler) was G. K, Chesterton, who served from the inception of
the club until his death in He was succeeded by E. C. Bent-
ley, the author of Trent’s Last Case, who still occupies the chair.
Secretary of the club at this writing is the transplanted American,
John Dickson Carr. The membership of the club is kept by char-
ter relatively small, but includes the most distinguished names in
British detective fiction. Election to membership is a coveted pro-
fessional recognition. Dues are nominal, but the club maintains
premises and a criminological library from the proceeds of occa-
sional anthologies in which the members participate, with royal-
ties accruing to the organization. Under the amusing lines of the
initiation ritual reproduced below are some substantial hints of
the society's elevated professional standards, thus bringing the
matter within our purview.

It is interesting to note that the Detection Club's recently or-
ganized American opposite number, Mystery Writers of America,
Inc., has no comparable ritual or oath, but boasts of a suitably
ungrammatical Latin motto of which the older organization may
well be envious: Qui Fecit? Or, in the vulgate: Whodunit?

Q 0 0 0 0 0 Q Q 0 9 ft 0 0 0 P Q 0 j? 9 0 a 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ,0 0 0 p 0 0 0 0,P 0 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

The Ruler shall say to the Candidate:

M. N., is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detec*
tion Club?

Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice:

That is my desire.

^97

The Detection Club Oath

198

Ruler:

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect
the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may
please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on
nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition,
Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of
God?

Candidate:

I do.

Ruler:

Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the
reader?

Candidate:

1 do.

Ruler:

Do you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of
Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-
Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics; and utterly
and for ever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Sci-
ence?

Candidate:

I do.

Ruler:

Will you honour the King's English?

Candidate:

I will.

Then the Ruler shall ask:

M. N., is there anything you hold sacred?

Then the Candidate having named a Thing which he holds of
peculiar sanctity the Ruler shall ask:

M. N., do you swear by (here the Ruler shall name the Thing
which the Candidate has declared to be his Peculiar Sanctity)
to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so
long as you are a Member of the Club?

But if the Candidate is not able to name a Thing which he holds
sacred^ then the Ruler shall propose the Oath in this manner
following:

M. N., do you as you hope to increase your Sales, swear to ob-

The Detection Club Oath igg

serve faithfully all these promises which you have made, so
long as you are a Member of the Club?

Then the Candidate shall say:

All this I solemnly do swear. And I do furthermore promise and
undertake to be loyal to the Club, neither purloining nor
disclosing any plot or secret communicated to me before pub-
lication by any Member, whether under the influence of
drink or otherwise.

Then shall the Ruler say to the Company:

If there be any Member present who objects to the Proposal
let him or her so declare.

If there he an Objector^ the Ruler shall appoint a time and place
for the seemly discussion of the matter, and shall say to the Can-
didate, and to the Company:

Forasmuch as we are hungry and that there may be no unseemly
wrangling amongst us, I invite you, M. N., to be our Guest
to-night, and I hold you to the solemn promise which you
have given as touching the theft or revelation of plots and
secrets.

But if there be no Objector, then shall the Ruler say to the Mem-
bers:

Do you then acclaim M. N. as a Member of our Club?

Then the Company* s Crier, or the Member appointed thereto by
the Secretary, shall lead the Company in such cries of approval
as are within his compass or capacity. When the cries cease,
whether for lack of breath or for any other cause, the Ruler
shall make this declaration:

M. N., you are duly elected a Member of the Detection Club,
and if you fail to keep your promise, may other writers an-
ticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your
contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages
swarm with misprints and may your sales continually dimin-
ish, Amen.

Then the Candidate, and after him all the Members present, shall
say:

Amen.

In which leading writers^ editors^ and specialists discuss the craft
of mystery fiction. Selections in this and succeeding sections which
are not otherwise credited are original contributions ^ written espe-
cially for this volume.

The Case of the Early Beginning
By Erie Stanley Gardner

000000000000 000 00 000 ooooooooooOooooobooooooooooooo^o

The story of speed and movement — action^ in short — has been a
characteristically American gift to modern detective fiction. Mr.
Gardner brings a freshj authoritative^ and important viewpoint to
bear on the true beginnings and nature of this vigorous "'type/'
which has become the preferred reading of so many devotees on
both sides of the ocean. As a foremost alumnus of the hard-fisted
school which originated this variety of crime fiction^ the creator
of Perry Mason and Douglas Selby will be heard with respect on
his chosen subject.

i? 0 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 p 0 Jp 0 0 Q Q 0 P 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 P p 0 0 O Q 0 0 , 0 0 0 0 Q Q

The action type of mystery story made its first bow in the Amer-
ican woodpnlp magazines. Every so often someone will make the
statement that it originated with Dashiell Hammett in a book en-
titled The Maltese Falcon, published in 1930. (Actually, Hammett
himself had published two previous detective stories in book
form: Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, both issued in 1929.)
But by the time the action mystery story first appeared in books
it was old stuff.

It is hard to tell who originally started the vogue. I think it
was around 1923 or 1924 that Hammett's first detective stories be-
gan to appear in magazine form. At least as early as 1922 Car-
roll John Daly had published a story entitled *‘The False Burton
Combs" in Black Mask magazine. That story featured Race Wil-
liams, who was, perhaps, the forerunner of all the hard-boiled
detective characters. At that time, George Sutton was editor of
Black Mask. I believe that Sutton published the first detective
story Carroll John Daly ever wrote, the first detective story Dash-
iell Hammett ever wrote, and the first detective story I ever wrote.

203

204 Erie Stanley Gardner

(At that time, 1923, I was writing under the name of Charles M.
Green.)

Shortly afterwards, Phil Cody became editor of Black Mask,
and had an associate editor named Harry North. Cody had a keen
appreciation of literature and of the detective story, and under
his regime the new action type of detective story took a long
stride forward. But I doubt if even Phil Cody appreciated the full
extent to which this type of story was destined to change the read-
ing habits of mystery fans. He did, however, confide to me that
he used Daly, Hammett, and Gardner as the backbone of the
magazine and intended to continue to do so.

Then, commencing with the November 1926 issue. Captain
Joseph T. Shaw became editor of Black Mask. Shaw quickly ap-
preciated the importance of the type of stories that the magazine
had been running and made a conscious effort to feature them as
a distinct literary departure from the older school of writing.

Carroll John Daly published his first detective book {The
White Circle) in 1926, some three years before Hammett brought
out Red Harvest and four years before The Maltese Falcon made
its appearance in book form. The late William Lyon Phelps was
one of the few book reviewers who appreciated the rugged vi-
rility of Daly's work. The old maestro delved into woodpulps as
well as books and had an especial fondness for mystery stories. I
think he probably knew fully as much about them as any book
reviewer. I remember that about a year before his death I dis-
cussed with him the first beginnings of the new type of detective
story, and was interested to find out that he had been watching
Daly's work for years and was fully familiar with the part Daly
had played in developing the new type.

Understand, there is a great diflEerence between type and style.
After the success of The Maltese Falcon, many writers began to
imitate Hammett’s style, which was distinct and original with him.
I think of all the early pulp writers who contributed to the new
format of the detective story, the word “genius” was more nearly
applicable to Hammett than to any of the rest. Unfortunately,
however, because Hammett’s manner was so widely imitated, it
became the habit for the reviewers to refer to “the Hammett
School” as embracing the type of story as well as the style. This

The Case of the Early Beginning S05

has caused some confusion. Daly did as much, or more, than any
other author to develop the type.

Just by way of illustration, let’s consider a few of Daly’s open-
ings. These are the first paragraphs of some of his early stories.
Here’s one: 'T dropped to one knee and fired twice/' Here’s an-
other: 'T didn't like his face and I told him so/'

And here’s a third: *‘The dead girl lay in the gutter. She was
not a pretty sight. Someone had stuck a knife in her chest and
turned it around,"

Daly started his stories with action and told them in terms of
action. The readers liked them. In fact, I remember Harry North
telling me that when he put Race Williams on the cover, the
magazine sales jumped fifteen per cent.

It was right around this time that Hammett started his *‘Gon-
tinental Operative” stories in Black Mask, They were told in
terms of action, but not quite as vivid, or perhaps one might say
as lurid, an action as those of Daly. But they were told objec-
tively, and there was about them that peculiar attitude of aloof-
ness and detachment which is so characteristic of the Hammett
style.

My own stories during this period largely featured the adven-
tures of one Ed Jenkins, a so called “Phantom Crook,” as well
as a Western character named Black Barr and a juggler detec-
tive who used a billiard cue cane to pop out the teeth of the vil-
lains in the last paragraph.

In those days the doctrine of “playing fair with the reader”
was in its infancy. I remember writing a long letter to the editor
complaining that readers of the early classical detective stories
couldn’t be expected to compete with the detective because they
didn’t know that there had been a shower just before midnight
in a certain section of London until after the detective casually
mentioned it, etc., etc., and insisting that a story could be told in
which all of the clues were actually placed in the hands of the
reader.

Personally, I think it is a mistake to confuse the so called “hard-
boiled” type of detective story with the action type of detective
story. For very apparent reasons, the hard-boiled story is almost
invariably told in the format of the action story; but the action

2o6 Erie Stanley Gardner

story is not necessarily the hard-boiled story. In fact, there is some
evidence indicating that the so-called hard-boiled story may be los-
ing in popularity while the action detective story is gaining in
popularity.

Perhaps one reason for this is that there is, after all, an inherent
improbability in most of the hard-boiled stories. The hero is
usually captured by the big, bad villains, given a shot of mor-
phine, awakens in an isolated house with a huge gorilla sitting in
the room, methodically chewing gum. The hero asks questions,
makes wisecracks, and from time to time the gorilla calmly gets
up, walks over to the bed and beats up on the hero. After that,
three or four other villains come in and start exercising. The hero
is beaten into unconsciousness two or three times, but eventually
manages to slug his way into the clear. Thereafter the only evi-
dence of his beatings is shown by the increased tempo with which
he dashes around making love to complaisant women and killing
villains.

A short time ago I was discussing the hard-boiled story with a
citizen who had quite apparently been around a good deal. He
told me he simply couldn't read the things. I asked him why not.
He looked at me with a mournful expression. “Have you," he
asked, “ever been beaten up? — I mean really and truly beaten
up."

I muttered something about my boxing days and remembered
a couple of particularly nasty fights. . . .

He shook his head, “I mean really beaten up."

I confessed that I hadn't been.

He had. Three gangsters had really gone to work on him. He
was a pretty tough individual, but it was three months before
he could carry on. Every time he read of a beaten-up hero going
on the make with a hot number, he shuddered and tossed the
book aside.

But one thing is certain. Regardless of the type of story or the
style in which it is told, it is now pretty well established that it
isn't cricket for the detective to peer into a dark corner, pick up
something “which I couldn't see" and casually drop it into his
pocket. It is also interesting to note that many of the clues these
days are clues of action. In other words, the detective doesn't find

The Case of the Early Beginning 207

a broken cuff link or a fragment of curved glass at the scene of
the crime. Instead, one of the characters does something that
turns out to be the significant clue.

All of this, in turn, is having a rather interesting effect on
reader psychology. The modern detective novel has to be logical.
It is usually fast moving. It has about it an air of authenticity and
generally is getting to be more true to life. As a result, some of
the readers of detective stories are not only getting pretty smart
when it comes to picking out the guilty party in the book, but
they’re becoming pretty good detectives in real life.

In 1943 when I was sent to the Bahamas by the New York
Journal-American to cover the famous DeMarigny murder trial at
Nassau, I received many letters from readers who were eagerly
following my account of the trial. Some of these letters and the
accompanying suggestions were of course merely obvious guesses,
but a surprisingly large number contained practical suggestions
which would have done credit to any detective in the history of
crime fiction.

All of which goes a long way toward supporting a theory I
have held for some time that, taken by and large, the readers of
the modern detective stories are a pretty shrewd lot, and the more
that detective stories become logical In treatment and develop-
ment, the more the mysteiy story fans^ — or addicts if you will — ^are
developing their powers of deductive reasoning.

Gaudy Night
By Dorothy L. Sayers

Ttrsinrytnns o o o o o o <ro o o o o o o o o o o o o o^r^roTiroirtnnr^^

Mr. Gardner has told us valuably of the origins and growth of
an important American type-contribution to the detective story.
Now comes Miss Sayers with a self-searching account of the crea-
tion and development of the most widely known of contemporary
English detective characters^ Lord Peter Wimsey^ and — by infer-
ence — of a school of police fiction as indigenously British as the
action story is American, Her essay^ which has not been previ-
ously published in America, appeared as a chapter in Titles to
Fame, edited by Denys K, Roberts {London: Nelson, i 9 ^ 7 )> The
title of the essay is of course taken from Miss Sayers* novel of the
same name.

When in a light-hearted manner I set out, fifteen years ago, to
write the first “Lord Peter” book, it was with the avowed inten-
tion of producing something “less like a conventional detective
story and more like a novel.” Re-reading Whose Body? at this
distance of time I observe, with regret, that it is conventional to
the last degree, and no more like a novel than I to Hercules.
This is not really surprising, because one cannot write a novel
unless one has something to say about life, and I had nothing to
say about it, because I knew nothing. However, the book eventu-
ally (with what labour, O Prince, what pain) found a publisher,
and that in spite of what an Oxford coach of mine used to call
“lamentable lacunae” in the plot, due to technical ignorance. I
doubt very much whether, if Gaudy Night had been written in
192s, it would ever have seen the light. The detective story of that
period enjoyed a pretty poor reputation, and was not expected
to contain anything that could be mistaken for “serious reading.”

208

Gaudy Night 209

G. K. Chesterton had, indeed, succeeded in making it the vehicle
of a reasoned philosophy; but then, he was an acknowledged gen-
ius, renowned for fantastical paradox, and a philosophical deteo
tive story was just one more paradox to his credit.

The ordinary beginner had to proceed with caution and to ac-
quire technical facility in the process. During the next ten years
the technique of detective fiction did improve out of all knowl-
edge in the hands of a number of brilliant writers, and we all
became a great deal more careful about our facts. Some of us,
from time to time, even indulged in a little “good writing*’ here
and there, and were encouraged by finding it well received. We
also took occasion to preach at every opportunity that if the de-
tective story was to live and develop it must get back to where
it began in the hands of Collins and Le Fanu, and become once
more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle. My
own voice was raised very loudly to proclaim this doctrine, be-
cause I still meant my books to develop along those lines at all
costs, and it does no harm to let one’s theory act as herald to one’s
practice. Some people did not agree with us. Mr. Willard Hunt-
ington Wright (Van Dine) still believes, for example, that every
vestige of humanity should be ruthlessly expunged from the de-
tective novel; but I am sure he is wrong and we are right. It is
not only that the reader gets tired after a time of a literature with-
out bowels; in the end the writer gets tired of it too, and that is
fatal.

Taking it all in all, I think it is true that each successive book
of mine worked gradually nearer to the sort of thing I had in
view. The Documents in the Case, which is a serious “criticism
of life” so far as it goes, took a jump forward rather out of its
due time; The Five Red Herrings was a cast back towards the
“time-table” puzzle-problem. Strong Poison, to which I shall have
to return later, rather timidly introduced the “love-element” into
the Peter Wimsey story. I think the first real attempt at fusing
the two kinds of novel was made in Murder Must Advertise, in
which, for the first time, the criticism of life was not relegated
to incidental observations and character sketches, but was actu-
ally part of the plot, as it ought to be. It was not quite successful;
the idea of symbolically opposing two cardboard worlds — that of

210 Dorothy L, Sayers

the advertiser and the drug-taker — ^was all right; and it was suita-
ble that Peter, who stands for reality, should never appear in
either except disguised; but the working-out was a little too melo-
dramatic, and the handling rather uneven. The Nine Tailors
was a shot at combining detection with poetic romance, and was,
I think, pretty nearly right, except that Peter himself remained,
as it were, extraneous to the story and untouched by its spiritual
conflicts. This was correct practice for a detective hero, but not
for the hero of a novel of manners. At this point you will begin
to suspect that Peter was fast becoming a major problem to his
inconsiderate creator, and so indeed he was.

It is amazing how recklessly one embarks upon adventures of
the most hideous toil and difficulty, and that with one’s eyes wide
open. I had from the outset, of course, envisaged for Peter a pro-
longed and triumphal career, going on through book after book
amid the plaudits of adoring multitudes. It is true that his setting
forth did not cause as great a stir as I had expected, and that
the adoring multitudes were represented by a small, though faith-
ful, band of adherents. But time would, I hoped, bring the public
into a better frame of mind, and I plugged confidently on, put-
ting my puppet through all his tricks and exhibiting him in a
number of elegant attitudes. But I had not properly realized —
and this shows how far I was from understanding what it was I
was trying to do with the detective novel — that any character that
remains static except for a repertory of tricks and attitudes is
bound to become a monstrous weariness to his maker in the
course of nine or ten volumes. Let me confess that when I »under-
took Strong Poison it was with the infanticidal intention of doing
away with Peter; that is, of marrying him off and getting rid of
him — for a lingering instinct of self-preservation, and the deter-
rent object-lesson of Mr. Holmes’s rather scrambling return from
the Reichenbach Falls, prevented me from actually killing and
burying the nuisance.

Two things stood in the way of my fell purpose. First, in ac-
cordance with the general contradictoriness of things, just when
I had decided that I could not do with Peter for a single moment
more, the multitudes began, though rather sparsely and belatedly,
to roll up and hang hopefully about along the route, uttering

Gaudy Night gii

agreeable cheers and convinced that the show was billed to con-
tinue. Some of them even did a little mild adoring, and I was
quite pathetically grateful to them and disposed to give Peter
a little longer run. But what really stayed my hand was some-
thing still more unexpected, and in a sense more creditable. I
could not marry Peter off to the young woman he had (in the
conventional Perseus manner) rescued from death and infamy,
because I could find no form of words in which she could accept
him without loss of self-respect. I had landed my two chief pup-
pets in a situation where, according to all the conventional rules
of detective fiction, they should have had nothing to do but fall
into one another’s arms; but they would not do it, and that for a
very good reason. When I looked at the situation I saw that it was
in every respect false and degrading; and the puppets had some-
how got just so much flesh and blood in them that I could not
force them to accept it without shocking myself.

So there were only two things to do: one was to leave the thing
there, with the problem unresolved; the other, far more delicate
and dangerous, was to take Peter away and perform a major opera-
tion on him. If the story was to go on, Peter had got to become
a complete human being, with a past and a future, with a con-
sistent family and social history, with a complicated psychology
and even the rudiments of a religious outlook. And all this would
have to be squared somehow or other with such random attributes
as I had bestowed upon him over a series of years in accordance
with the requirements of various detective plots.

The thing seemed difficult, but not impossible. When I came
to examine the patient, he showed the embryonic buds of a char-
acter of sorts. Even at the beginning he had not been the complete
silly ass: he had only played the silly ass, which was not the same
thing. He had had shell-shock and a vaguely embittered love af-
fair; he had a mother and a friend and a sketchy sort of brother
and sister; he had literary and musical tastes, and a few well-
defined opinions and feelings; and a little tidying-up of dates and
places would put his worldly affairs into order. The prognosis
seemed fairly favorable; so I laid him out firmly on the operating-
table and chipped away at his internal mechanism through three
longish books. At the end of the process he was five years older

212 Dorothy L. Sayers

than he was in Strong Poison^ and twelve years older than he
was when he started. If, during the period, he had altered and
mellowed a little, I felt I could reasonably point out that most
human beings were altered and mellowed by age. One of the
first results of the operation was an indignant letter from a fe-
male reader of Gaudy Night asking, What had happened to Peter?
he had lost all his elfin charm. I replied that any man who
retained elfin charm at the age of forty-five should be put in
a lethal chamber. Indeed, Peter escaped that lethal chamber by
inches.

But I was still no further along with the problem of Harriet.
She had been a human being from the start, and I had humanized
Peter for her benefit; but the situation between them had become
still more impossible on that account. Formerly, she could not
marry him to live on gratitude; now, he had advanced to a point
where he could not possibly want her to do anything of the kind.
Her inferiority complex was making her steadily more brutal to
him and his newly developed psychology was making him stead-
ily more sensitive to her inhibitions. Clearly, they could not go
on like this; and time was passing with alarming rapidity, at this
rate they would be gyey-headed before they were reconciled. At
all costs, some device must be found for putting Harriet back
on a footing of equality with her lover. It was clear that it would
be of great help to her to receive a proposal from another, and
entirely disinterested man; but this, by itself, was not enough.

About this time I was playing with the idea of a “straight**
novel, about an Oxford woman graduate who found, in middle
life, and after a reasonably satisfactory experience of marriage and
motherhood, that her real vocation and full emotional fulfilment
were to be found in the creative life of the intellect. While in-
vestigating the possibilities of this subject, I was asked to go to
Oxford and propose the toast of the University at my College
Gaudy dinner. I had to ask myself exactly what it was for which
one had to thank a university education, and came to the con-
clusion that it was, before everything, that habit of intellectual in-
tegrity which is at once the foundation and the result of scholar-
ship.

Having delivered myself of these sentiments in a speech, the

Gaudy Night 213

substance of which (stripped of its post-prandial rhetoric) was
later embodied in an article in the official organ of the Oxford
Society, I discovered that in Oxford I had the solution to all my
three problems at once. On the intellectual platform, alone of
all others, Harriet could stand free and equal with Peter, since
in that sphere she had never been false to her own standards. By
choosing a plot that should exhibit intellectual integrity as the
one great permanent value in an emotionally unstable world I
should be saying the thing that, in a confused way, I had been
wanting to say all my life. Finally, I should have found a uni-
versal theme which could be made integral both to the detective
plot and to the 'love-interest” which I had, somehow or other,
to unite with it.

The more I looked at the idea, the more I liked it. It had a
further advantage in its setting. Books had been written before
about the women’s colleges, but usually by dissatisfied young per-
sons recently down from Oxford, and concerned only to deride her
external futilities and absurdities without understanding of or
sympathy for her inner values. Possibly it is easier to realize those
values after twenty years of reflection in other surroundings. I
did not suppose that many people would be interested in aca-
demic women or academic values, but since there was something
I wanted to say about them, that was good enough.

The plot itself gave me little trouble. Murder — the first crime
that suggests itself to the detective novelist — must be excluded.
Murder meant publicity and the police, and I wanted to keep my
action within the control of the Senior Common Room. There
was one crime which could readily be dealt with by academic au-
thorities, and which they would be particularly anxious to screen
from publicity, and that was the crime of disseminating obscene
libels, and committing malicious damage. It was the kind of crime
which the world in general would be ready enough to connect
with a community of celibate women, and which, for that very
reason, would automatically place all the members of the college
staflE under the suspicion both of each other and of the reader. And
it was not too outrageously melodramatic: murder is rare, though
not unknown, in college life; mischief-making in a minor way
is less uncommon and has a much more plausible air.

214 Dorothy L, Sayers

Next, it was necessary for my theme that the malice should be
the product, not of intellect starved of emotion, but of emotion
uncontrolled by intellect. And to knit the plot tight it must be
more than this: it must be emotion revenging itself upon the in-
tellect for some injury wrought by the intellect upon the emo-
tions, What harm could intellectual women do, in virtue of their
intellect, to an emotional woman? I imagined the case of a woman
who, in her academic capacity, was obliged to expose a crime of
intellectual dishonesty committed by a man (somebody’s husband,
father, lover, brother), and so deprive him of his academic status
and, consequently, of his livelihood. I placed this suggestion be-
fore an academic friend, asking whether the situation were pos-
sible. The reply was, “It is not only possible; it happened.” In
fact, when I came to look into details, the real case was so like
my imagination that I had to make some alterations in my plot
so as to avoid a dangerously close resemblance to fact. This weak-
ened probability a little, but not in such a way as to affect the
course of the story.

The actual mechanics of the plot presented problems. A college
of the size and importance I had in mind may contain two hun-
dred people, not counting some thirty of the resident domestic
staff and the daily cleaning women. Also, a college is a large,
rambling place into any part of which anybody may penetrate at
all hours of the day. At night it is, or is supposed to be, securely
locked against outsiders; but every building in it possesses at least
one open door, and both students and dons may parade the cor-
ridors and gardens unquestioned whenever it seems good to them.
Obviously, one could not cope with a couple of hundred suspects
within the college, not to say the entire university and city of
Oxford without the walls. By various devices I endeavoured to
eliminate (a) the majority of the students, (b) the majority of the
scouts, and (c) all persons who could only have access in the day-
time; leaving myself with the Senior Common Room, a few stu-
dents, a few scouts, and a rascally ex-porter to carry the brunt of
suspicion. Among these persons I placed my culprit, the exasper-
ated widow of the dishonest scholar. I engaged a kindly and com-
petent architect to design me a feasible college, so that I should
not tie myself up in my own geography, and I obtained the

Gaudy Night 215

courteous permission of the Master of Balliol to erect that col-
lege upon the Balliol playing-fields off Jowett Walk.

All this part of the business was the commonplace mechanics
of the detective-novelist’s job. The new and exciting thing was
to bring the love-problem into line with the detective-problem,
so that the same key should unlock both at once. I had Harriet,
feeling herself for the first time on equal ground with Peter,
seeing in the attractions of the intellectual life a means of free-
ing herself from the emotional obsession he produced in her, and
yet seeing (as she supposed) that the celibate intellectual life ren-
dered one liable to insanity in its ugliest form. I had Peter, seeing
the truth from the start and perfectly conscious that he had only
to leave her under her misapprehension to establish his emo-
tional ascendancy over her. The temptation to take advantage of
her mistake had to present itself to him in some form or other.
That he should consider abandoning the investigation and leav-
ing the upshot in doubt was too crude. It would be enough if,
while she was still hesitating, he was tempted to use his physical
charm to precipitate an emotional surrender from which there
could be no subsequent return. I presented him with three op-
portunities for betrayal: once when Harriet exposes her own weak-
ness in a sentimental moment on the river; again, when in the
Botanical Gardens he warns her against letting emotions interfere
with judgment; and finally, when she throws herself into his arms
under the shock of finding the mischief-maker’s malice turned
against herself. In the meantime, I had made Harriet’s surrender
easier by letting her see Peter’s weaknesses instead of (as hitherto)
his strength: his jealous irritation at the misdeeds of a prodigal
nephew; his personal vanities, his carefully concealed sentimental-
ities, his resentment of his own small stature and its compensat-
ing outbursts of childish exhibitionism; the mere helplessness of
physical fatigue and so forth; and had further enhanced his at-
tractions by making somebody else fall in love with him. I had
also, to my great delight, succeeded in working into the book my
original idea of a proposal from another man, in the imbecile epi-
sode where Mr. Pomfret avows his undergraduate passion in the
grim presence of the Proctor. Thus, the train was laid for the over-
throw of Harriet’s defences if Peter chose to fire it.

2i6 Dorothy L, Sayers

This was where the theme of intellectual integrity came in.
Peter’s honesty of mind had to tell him that if Harriet accepted him
under any sort of misapprehension, or through any insincerity on
his part, they would be plunged into a situation even more false
and intolerable than that from which they started. She must come
to him as a free agent, if she came at all, and must realize that
she was independent of him before she could bring him her de-
pendence as a willing gift. At all costs, and even at the risk of los-
ing her altogether, he must prevent her from committing

the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason,

and (through the machinery of the detective plot) show her the
final baseness of which love was capable before he could ask her
to risk the adventure with him.

The book is thus seen to be very tightly constructed, the plot
and the theme being actually one thing, namely, that the same
intellectual honesty that is essential to scholarship is essential also
to the conduct of life. This proposition is fully discussed in the
long conversation in the Senior Common Room between Peter
and the dons. By one of those curious ironies which provide so
wholesome a check to the vanity of authors, Gaudy Night had
been loudly condemned by some critics for lack of construction.
It would be truer to say that it is the only book I have ever writ-
ten which has any construction at all, beyond a purely artificial
plot-construction. Some of the blame is undoubtedly mine for
not having made the construction more explicit (though I thought
I was laying its articulations bare with an openness verging on
indecency). I really think, however, that the construction was ob-
scured by the conviction, still lingering in many people’s minds,
that a detective plot cannot bear any relation to a universal
theme.

In the sixties of the last century there was still no divorce be-
tween plot and theme. Man and Wife is a mystery story built on
the theme of the unequal marriage laws of the Three Kingdoms;
and that theme provides the mainspring of the plot. It is only of
recent years that we have had detective stories composed entirely
of plot, without theme, or with the theme a mere incidental em-

Gaudy Night 217

broidery. We have even had stories divorced from their settings;
bodies are discovered (for instance) in churches, theatres, railway
stations, ships, aeroplanes, and so forth, which might just as well
have been discovered anywhere else, the setting being put in only
for picturesqueness and forming no integral part either of theme
or plot. To make an artistic unity it is, I feel, essential that the
plot should derive from the setting, and that both should form
part of the theme. From this point of view. Gaudy Night does, I
think, stand reasonably well up to the test; the setting is a women’s
college; the plot derives from, and develops through, episodes that
could not have occurred in any other place; and the theme is the
relation of scholarship to life. I am sure the book is constructed
on the right lines, though I am naturally conscious of innumera-
ble defects in the working.

I admit that when I had completed my monster, I felt some of
the uneasiness of Count Frankenstein under the same circum-
stances. Some of my friends were dubious: they admitted that they
had been led up the garden path, like Harriet, by the psycho-
logical red-herring, and had quite properly suspected the celibates
and been surprised by the final anagnorisis; they added, with sin-
cere politeness, that this was an “important” piece of work, but
what (they asked) would the public make of it? Male readers
would probably not be interested in a bunch of middle-aged aca-
demic women, and would find Harriet unattractive. I rather
agreed with them, but thought there was one chance in a million
that the thing might come off. In any case, I knew it was useless
to try and write with a view to what the public might like: the
only thing one can do is to write what one wants to write and
hope for the best. I deposited the bulky manuscript on my pub-
lisher’s desk, telling him that if it didn’t strike lucky it would be
a sensational flop. He smiled cheerfully, and said he would take
the risk. I said I was afraid it was rather long. He, being an adept
in turning necessity to glorious gain, said that in that case we
could advertise it as the first detective story to be published at
8s 6d. He then read it (a thing which not every publisher will
do for his author) and comforted me with an expensive and ex-
pansive telegram predicting success. We wrote him down an in-
curable optimist.

2i8

Dorothy L. Sayers

Oddly enough, he was right, and the book sold. The ‘'male
reader’’ confounded prophecy by not merely displaying interest
in academic women, but by producing a strong “pro-Harriet”
party, which asserted, in the teeth of those female readers who
complained of Peter’s throwing himself away on Harriet, that
Harriet, on the contrary, was completely thrown away on Peter.
In America, opinion was divided: Boston in the east was wholly
favourable; with every succeeding meridian the accusations of
“culture” became more numerous and embittered, and the lament
over the absence of bloodshed more shrill; wrath reached howling-
point in the voice of an anonymous gentleman in the Middle
West, who wrote to me with regrettable familiarity, “You have
done for yourself this time. Dot.” The American sales, however,
contradicted this ancestral voice prophesying doom.

I was once challenged, in a circle of writers, to account for the
sales of Gaudy Night. I had not the honesty to say that I thought
it sold because it was a good book. I do think it sold because it
was a sincere book upon a subject about which I really had some-
thing to say. I think, too, it sold because it dealt in a knowledge-
able way with the daily life of a little-known section of the com-
munity. Readers seem to like books which tell them how other
people live — any people, advertisers, bell-ringers, women dons,
butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers — so long as the detail is
full and accurate and the object of the work is not overt propa-
ganda. Finally, of course, there was Peter, who, escaping annihila-
tion and surviving a drastic surgical operation, has lived to see
himself surnamed “the Incomparable.”

I should like to be frank about Peter. It is not always wise to
take one’s puppets to pieces and display the mechanism, because,
with the present vogue for the sub-conscious, it is often supposed
that anything done consciously must be done insincerely. But
that is a blasphemy against the intellect. A character will not stand
square on its legs without conscious carpentry any more than a
table will; I would not put anything I valued on a table that had
dreamily evolved itself from the sub-conscious. I know quite well
how Peter was put together, and how his love-affair was put to-
gether; but the fact of my knowledge does not make the construc-
tion in the wrong sense artificial. There is more truth in the ac-

Gaudy Night 219

cusation, frequently made, that Peter is a “wish-fulfilment'*; that
is, there would be more truth in it if those who make it were in
a position to understand my wishes in the matter. There are two
ways of creating a fictitious character: one, the more superficial
perhaps, is to take observed behaviour and try to deduce from it
the motives from which it springs. The other is to take some pass-
ing mood of one’s own mind and say to one’s self, If this fleeting
mood were to become a dominant attitude of mind, what would
my behaviour be under given circumstances? Putting aside the
accidental attributes that an amateur detective must possess to
get through his work without too much outside help — such, for
example, as money, leisure, physical endurance, and the tricks of
this or that trade — the essential Peter is seen to be the familiar
figure of the interpretative artist, the romantic soul at war with
the realistic brain. Harriet, with her lively and inquisitive mind
and her soul grounded upon reality, is his complement — the crea-
tive artist; her make-up is more stable than his, and far more
capable of self-dependence. On the surface he is a comedian; his
dislocation is at the centre: she is tragic externally, for all her
dissatisfactions are patent, but she has the central unity which
he has not. In the novel Busman*s Honeymoon Harriet says “I’ve
hated almost everything that ever happened to me, but I knew
all the time it was just things that were wrong, not everything.”
Peter replies, “With me it’s always been the other way round. I
can enjoy practically everything that comes along — ^while it’s hap-
pening. Only I have to keep on doing things, because if I once
stop, it all seems a lot of rot.” They are the two moods of the
artistic spirit, separated and shown as dominant in two distinct per-
sonalities. Their only hope of repose is in union, though even
then (as Miss De Vine says in Gaudy Night) “it can only be the re-
pose of a very delicate balance.” In that sense Peter — or rather,
the Peter-Harriet combination — does represent the wish-fulfilment
of the artist; though when people use that phrase I do not suppose
that is what they mean by it.

It is difficult to make these explanations without appearing to
take Peter too solemnly. I am comforted by the reflection that his
readers are far more solemn about him than I am. I have received
letters saying, “I absolutely refuse to go and see Peter and Har-

220

Dorothy L. Sayers

riet portrayed upon the stage, for fear of having my ideals shat-
tered.’' The robust author, having preserved her ideals unscathed
through three grinding weeks of rehearsal and several months of
the play’s run, can, under these circumstances, only marvel at a
sensitiveness so exaggerated, and gnash her teeth over the loss of
royalties.

I am often asked, ‘‘Will Peter’s career end with his marriage?”
Alas! I can now see no end to Peter this side of the grave. The In-
comparable Peter is more fatally than ever Peter the Ineluctable.
Formerly a periodic visitation, he has become a permanent resi-
dent in the house of my mind. His affairs are more real to me than
my own; his domestic responsibilities haunt my waking hours,
and I find myself bringing all my actions and opinions to the
bar of his silent criticism. He darkens the future, so that I can-
not now contrive an episode in his career without considering how
it will affect him and his in ten years’ time, and have to write
every book with wary eye to the next book but two. He is sur-
rounded by a gang of friends and relations, who all have to be
fitted into the story somehow; I discover with alarm that his chil-
dren are coming tumbling into the world before I have time to
chronicle these events, and I am distracted and confused by the
friendly letters of readers, giving him and Harriet the best advice
upon child-welfare. He sprawls over the past like an octopus. The
faces of his former loves — Barbara, the moonlight princess, and
the red-haired Viennese singer (“music is his line”), and Natalie
with her Gibson-girl figure and pompadour hair who taught him
his metier d'amant so many years ago, the lady (was she a Pole
or a Spaniard?) who lived in the Avenue KMber and made “des
histoires” with her maid, and the Italian who involved him in a
ridiculous duel in Corsica — ^peep nodding and smiling out of the
curtains of Peter’s marriage-bed and threaten to reappear in his
life. The course of English history is disturbed by the antics of
dead-and-gone Wimseys, who leap from its waters like so many
salmon in the mating season. My friends have become infected
with my own madness; they wrestle valiantly with dates and genea-
logical trees and armorial bearings; they assist me to write spoof
pamphlets about eighteenth century Wimseys, adorned with plaus-
ible excerpts from Evelyn and Bubb Dodington and Horace Wal-

221

Gaudy Night

pole; they embellish these fantasies with family portraits and con-
temporary views of Bredon Hall; they accept the existence of a
poetical Wimsey who was a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and meekly
sit down to set his songs to music, while the local chemist pre-
pares ink from an Elizabethan recipe wherewith I may forge the
original manuscripts in a fair secretary hand. We discover Wimsey
ciphers embedded in the plays of Shakespeare, and retrieve Wim-
sey common-place books from remote corners of Australia; we
sally forth in a team to foist these discoveries upon bewildered
literary societies in respectable universities. I cannot imagine
where all this is going to end; it is all very well to Peter to be
a comedian, but he must have inherited that trait from somebody,
and I occasionally wonder whether the comedian in one or other
of us is not getting a little out of hand. At any rate, the whole
thing, is a warning against inventing characters whose existence
has to be prolonged through a long series of books:

Et certes est-ce bien un grief labeur que d'excogiter cent contes
drolatiques?

The Simple Art of Murder
By Raymond Chandler

irsiTlJ o'bo'booooooooooooooooooooooooooftooooooooboO oinnnnf

There are readers who can enjoy virtually any variety of detec-
tive story so long as it is sufficiently well done in its kind. There
are sterner souls — and in the democracies such is their inalienable
right — who hold to likes and dislikes for specific types approach-
ing the violent. As one of the most aware, articulate, and Uterarily
gifted of American detective novelists — the creator of Philip Mar-
lowe and author of such purposeful narratives as The Big Sleep
and Farewell My Lovely — Raymond Chandler is admirably quali-
fied to wield the cudgels for what he terms ''realistic mystery fic-
tion'' and against those he considers its traducers. His essay ap-
peared originally in the Atlantic Monthly for December 1944;
the version presented here was specially revised by Mr, Chandler
for this publication,

jtOJUUUliLSJlOO 000000 0000 fitoa^poo A OpOOQ(tpOpOOOQOOOQOOOp(r

Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. Old-
fashioned novels which now seem stilted and artificial to the point
of burlesque did not appear that way to the people who first read
them. Writers like Fielding and Smollett could seem realistic in
the modern sense because they dealt largely with uninhibited
characters, many of whom were about two jumps ahead of the
police, but Jane Austen’s chronicles of highly inhibited people
against a background of rural gentility seem real enough psycho-
logically. There is plenty of that kind of social and emotional
hypocrisy around today. Add to it a liberal dose of intellectual
pretentiousness and you get the tone of the book page in your
daily paper and the earnest and fatuous atmosphere breathed by
discussion groups in little clubs. These are the people who make
best-sellers, which are promotional jobs based on a sort of indi-

22%

The Simple Art of Murder 223

rect snob-appeal, carefully escorted by the trained seals of the
critical fraternity, and lovingly tended and watered by certain
much too powerful pressure groups whose business is selling
books, although they would like you to think they are fostering
culture. Just get a little behind in your payments and you will
find out how idealistic they are.

The detective story for a variety of reasons can seldom be pro-
moted. It is usually about murder and hence lacks the element
of uplift. Murder, which is a frustration of the individual and
hence a frustration of the race, may, and in fact has, a good deal
of sociological implication. But it has been going on too long for
it to be news. If the mystery novel is at all realistic (which it very
seldom is) it is written in a certain spirit of detachment; other-
wise nobody but a psychopath would want to write it or read it.
The murder novel has also a depressing way of minding its own
business, solving its own problems and answering its own ques-
tions. There is nothing left to discuss, except whether it was well
enough written to be good fiction, and the people who make up
the half-million sales wouldn’t know that anyway. The detection
of quality in writing is difficult enough even for those who make
a career of the job, without paying too much attention to the
matter of advance sales.

The detective story (perhaps I had better call it that, since the
English formula still dominates the trade) has to find its public
by a slow process of distillation. That it does do this, and holds
on thereafter with such tenacity, is a fact; the reasons for it are
a study for more patient minds than mine. Nor is it any part of my
thesis to maintain that it is a vital and significant form of art.
There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art,
and precious little of that. The growth of populations has in no
way increased the amount; it has merely increased the adeptness
with which substitutes can be produced and packaged.

Yet the detective story, even in its most conventional form, is
difficult to write well. Good specimens of the art are much rarer
than good serious novels. Rather second-rate items outlast most
of the high velocity fiction, and a great many that should never
have been born simply refuse to die at all. They are as durable
as the statues in public parks and just about that dull. This is

224 Raymond Chandler

very annoying to people of what is called discernment. They do
not like it that penetrating and important works of fiction of a
few years back stand on their special shelf in the library marked
“Best-Sellers of Yesteryear/' and nobody goes near them but an
occasional shortsighted customer who bends down, peers briefly
and hurries away; while old ladies jostle each other at the mystery
shelf to grab off some item of the same vintage with a title like
The Triple Petunia Murder Case, or Inspector Pinchbottle to
the Rescue. They do not like it that “really important books” get
dusty on the reprint counter, while Death Wears Yellow Garters
is put out in editions of fifty or one hundred thousand copies on
the news-stands of the country, and is obviously not there just to
say goodbye.

To tell you the truth, I do not like it very much myself. In my
less stilted moments I too write detective stories, and all this im-
mortality makes just a little too much competition. Even Einstein
couldn’t get very far if three hundred treatises of the higher
physics were published every year, and several thousand others
in some form or other were hanging around in excellent condi-
tion, and being read too. Hemingway says somewhere that the
good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective
story writer (there must after all be a few) competes not only with
all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well.
And on almost equal terms; for it is one of the qualities of this
kind of writing that the thing that makes people read it never
goes out of style. The hero's tie may be a little off the mode and
the good gray inspector may arrive in a dogcart instead of a
streamlined sedan with siren screaming, but what he does when
he gets there is the same old futzing around with timetables and
bits of charred paper and who trampled the jolly old flowering
arbutus under the library window.

I have, however, a less sordid interest in the matter. It seems
to me that production of detective stories on so large a scale, and
by writers whose immediate reward is small and whose need of
critical praise is almost nil, would not be possible at all if the
job took any talent. In that sense the raised eyebrow of the critic
and the shoddy merchandizing of the publisher are perfectly logi-
cal, The average detective story is probably no worse than the

The Simple Art of Murder 225

average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get
published. The average — or only slightly above average — detec-
tive story does. Not only is it published but it is sold in small
quantities to rental libraries, and it is read. There are even a few
optimists who buy it at the full retail price of two dollars, be-
cause it looks so fresh and new, and there is a picture of a corpse
on the cover. And the strange thing is that this average, more
than middling dull, pooped-out piece of utterly unreal and me-
chanical fiction is not terribly dijBFerent from what are called the
masterpieces of the art. It drags on a little more slowly, the dia-
logue is a little grayer, the cardboard out of which the characters
are cut is a shade thinner, and the cheating is a little more obvi-
ous; but it is the same kind of book. Whereas the good novel is
not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about en-
tirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad
detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are
about them in very much the same way. There are reasons for
this too, and reasons for the reasons; there always are.

I suppose the principal dilemma of the traditional or classic
or straight-deductive or logic — ^and — deduction novel of detection
is that for any approach to perfection it demands a combination of
qualities not found in the same mind. The cool-headed construc-
tionist does not also come across with lively characters, sharp dia-
logue, a sense of pace and an acute use of observed detail. The
grim logician has as much atmosphere as a drawing-board. The
scientific sleuth has a nice new shiny laboratory, but Fm sorry
I can't remember the face. The fellow who can write you a vivid
and colorful prose simply won't be bothered with the coolie labor
of breaking down unbreakable alibis. The master of rare knowl-
edge is living psychologically in the age of the hoop skirt. If you
know all you should know about ceramics and Egyptian needle-
work, you don't know anything at all about the police. If you
know that platinum won't melt under about 2800 degrees F. by
itself, but will melt at the glance of a pair of deep blue eyes when
put close to a bar of lead, then you don't know how men make
love in the twentieth century. And if you know enough about
the elegant flanerie of the pre-war French Riviera to lay your story
in that locale, you don’t know that a couple of capsules of barbital

226 Raymond Chandler

small enough to be swallowed will not only not kill a man — they
will not even put him to sleep, if he fights against them.

Every detective story writer makes mistakes, and none will ever
know as much as he should. Conan Doyle made mistakes which
completely invalidated some of his stories, but he was a pioneer,
and Sherlock Holmes after all is mostly an attitude and a few
dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue. It is the ladies and gentle-
men of what Mr. Howard Haycraft (in his book Murder for
Pleasure) calls the Golden Age of detective fiction that really
get me down. This age is not remote. For Mr. Haycraft's purpose
it starts after the first World War and lasts up to about 1930. For
all practical purposes it is still here. Two- thirds or three-quarters
of all the detective stories published still adhere to the formula
the giants of this era created, perfected, polished and sold to the
world as problems in logic and deduction. These are stern words,
but be not alarmed. They are only words. Let us glance at one
of the glories of the literature, an acknowledged masterpiece of
the art of fooling the reader without cheating him. It is called
The Red House Mystery, was written by A. A. Milne, and has
been named by Alexander Woollcott (rather a fast man with a
superlative) ‘'one of the three best mystery stories of all time.”
Words of that size are not spoken lightly. The book was published
in 1922, but is quite timeless, and might as easily have been pub-
lished in July 1939, or, with a few slight changes, last week. It
ran thirteen editions and seems to have been in print, in the
original format, for about sixteen years. That happens to few
books of any kind. It is an agreeable book, light, amusing in the
Punch style, written with a deceptive smoothness that is not as
easy as it looks.

It concerns Mark Ablett's impersonation of his brother Robert,
as a hoax on his friends. Mark is the owner of the Red House,
a typical laburnum-and-lodge-gate English country house, and he
has a secretary who encourages him and abets him in this imper-
sonation, because the secretary is going to murder him, if he
pulls it ofE. Nobody around the Red House has ever seen Robert,
fifteen years absent in Australia, known to them by repute as a
no-good. A letter from Robert is talked about, but never shown.
It announces his arrival, and Mark hints it will not be a pleasant

The Simple Art of Murder 227

occasion. One afternoon, then, the supposed Robert arrives, iden-
tifies himself to a couple of servants, is shown into the study, and
Mark (according to testimony at the inquest) goes in after him.
Robert is then found dead on the floor with a bullet hole in his
face, and of course Mark has vanished into thin air. Arrive the
police, suspect Mark must be the murderer, remove the debris
and proceed with the investigation, and in due course, with the
inquest.

Milne is aware of one very difl&cult hurdle and tries as well as
he can to get over it. Since the secretary is going to murder Mark
once he has established himself as Robert, the impersonation has
to continue on and fool the police. Since, also, everybody around
the Red House knows Mark intimately, disguise is necessary. This
is achieved by shaving off Mark s beard, roughening his hands
('‘not the hands of a manicured gentlemen'' — testimony) and the
use of a gruff voice and rough manner. But this is not enough.
The cops are going to have the body and the clothes on it and
whatever is in the pockets. Therefore none of this must suggest
Mark. Milne therefore works like a switch engine to put over the
motivation that Mark is such a thoroughly conceited performer
that he dresses the part down to the socks and underwear (from
all of which the secretary has removed the maker's labels), like
a ham blacking himself all over to play Othello. If the reader will
buy this (and the sales record shows he must have) Milne figures
he is solid. Yet, however light in texture the story may be, it is
offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it
is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situa-
tion is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there
is no story for the light novel to be about. If the problem does
not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is no prob-
lem; if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce. If the
impersonation is impossible once the reader is told the conditions
it must fulfill, then the whole thing is a fraud. Not a deliberate
fraud, because Milne would not have written the story if he had
known what he was up against. He is up against a number of
deadly things, none of which he even considers. Nor, apparently,
does the casual reader, who wants to like the story, hence takes it
at its face value. But the reader is not called upon to know the

228 Raymond Chandler

facts of life; it is the author who is the expert in the case. Here
is what this author ignores:

1. The coroner holds formal jury inquest on a body for which
no competent legal identification is offered. A coroner, usually in
a big city, will sometimes hold inquest on a body that cannot be
identified, if the record of such an inquest has or may have a value
(fire, disaster, evidence of murder, etc,). No such reason exists
here, and there is no one to identify the body. A couple of wit-
nesses said the man said he was Robert Ablett. This is mere pre-
sumption, and has weight only if nothing conflicts with it. Identi-
fication is a condition precedent to an inquest. Even in death a
man has a right to his own identity. The coroner will, wherever
humanly possible, enforce that right. To neglect it would be a
violation of his office.

2. Since Mark Ablett, missing and suspected of the murder,
cannot defend himself, all evidence of his movements before and
after the murder is vital (as also whether he has money to run
away on); yet all such evidence is given by the man closest to
the murder, and is without corroboration. It is automatically sus-
pect until proved true.

3. The police find by direct investigation that Robert Ablett
was not well thought of in his native village. Somebody there must
have known him. No such person was brought to the inquest.
(The story couldn’t stand it.)

4. The police know there is an element of threat in Robert’s
supposed visit, and that it is connected with the murder must
be obvious to them. Yet they make no attempt to check Robert
in Australia, or find out what character he had there, or what as-
sociates, or even if he actually came to England, and with whom.
(If they had, they would have found out he had been dead three
years.)

5. The police surgeon examines the body with a recently shaved
beard (exposing unweathered skin), artificially roughened hands,
yet the body of a wealthy, soft-living man, long resident in a cool
climate. Robert was a rough individual and had lived fifteen years
in Australia. That is the surgeon’s information. It is impossible
he would have noticed nothing to conflict with it,

6. The clothes are nameless, empty, and have had the labels

The Simple Art of Murder 229

removed. Yet the man wearing them asserted an identity. The pre-
sumption that he was not what he said he was is overpowering.
Nothing whatever is done about this peculiar circumstance. It is
never even mentioned as being peculiar.

7. A man is missing, a well-known local man, and a body in
the morgue closely resembles him. It is impossible that the police
should not at once eliminate the chance that the missing man is
the dead man. Nothing would be easier than to prove it. Not even
to think of it is incredible. It makes idiots of the police, so that
a brash amateur may startle the world with a fake solution.

The detective in the case is an insouciant gent named Antony
Gillingham, a nice lad with a cheery eye, a cozy little flat in
London, and that airy manner. He is not making any money on
the assignment, but is always available when the local gendarmerie
loses its notebook. The English police seem to endure him with
their customary stoicism; but I shudder to think of what the boys
down at the Homicide Bureau in my city would do to him.

There are less plausible examples of the art than this. In Trends
Last Case (often called '‘the perfect detective story”) you have to
accept the premise that a giant of international finance, whose light-
est frown makes Wall Street quiver like a chihuahua, will plot his
own death so as to hang his secretary, and that the secretary when
pinched will maintain an aristocratic silence; the old Etonian in
him maybe. I have known relatively few international financiers,
but I rather think the author of this novel has (if possible) known
fewer. There is one by Freeman Wills Crofts (the soundest builder
of them all when he doesn't get too fancy) wherein a murderer by
the aid of makeup, split second timing, and some very sweet evasive
action, impersonates the man he has just killed and thereby gets
him alive and distant from the place of the crime. There is one of
Dorothy Sayers' in which a man is murdered alone at night in his
house by a mechanically released weight which works because he
always turns the radio on at just such a moment, always stands in
just such a position in front of it, and always bends over just so far.
A couple of inches either way and the customers would get a rain
.check. This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap;
a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in
the wrong business. And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie's

ggo Raymond Chandler

featuring M. Hercule Poirot, that ingenius Belgian who talks in a
literal translation of school-boy French, wherein, by duly messing
around with his “little gray cells,’* M. Poirot decides that nobody on
a certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, there-
fore everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a
series of simple operations, like assembling an egg-beater. This is
the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop.
Only a halfwit could guess it.

There are much better plots by these same writers and by others
of their school. There may be one somewhere that would really
stand up under close scrutiny. It would be fun to read it, even if I
did have to go back to page 47 and refresh my memory about ex-
actly what time the second gardener potted the prize-winning tea-
rose begonia. There is nothing new about these stories and nothing
old. The ones I mentioned are all English only because the authori-
ties (such as they are) seem to feel the English writers had an edge
in this dreary routine, and that the Americans, (even the creator of
Philo Vance — probably the most asinine character in detective fic-
tion) only made the Junior Varsity.

This, the classic detective story, has learned nothing and forgot-
ten nothing. It is the story you will find almost any week in the big
shiny magazines, handsomely illustrated, and paying due deference
to virginal love and the right kind of luxury goods. Perhaps the
tempo has become a trifle faster, and the dialogue a little more glib.
There are more frozen daiquiris and stingers ordered, and fewer
glasses of crusty old port; more clothes by Vogue, and decors by the
House Beautiful, more chic, but not more truth. We spend more
time in Miami hotels and Cape Cod summer colonies and go not so
often down by the old gray sundial in the Elizabethan garden. But
fundamentally it is the same careful grouping of suspects, the same
utterly incomprehensible trick of how somebody stabbed Mrs. Pot-
tington Postlethwaite III with the solid platinum poignard just as
she flatted on the top note of the Bell Song from Lakme in the pres-
ence of fifteen ill-assorted guests; the same ingenue in fur-trimmed
pajamas screaming in the night to make the company pop in and
out of doors and ball up the timetable; the same moody silence next
day as they sit around sipping Singapore slings and sneering at each

The Simple Art of Murder 231

other, while the iBat-feet crawl to and fro under the Persian rugs,
with their derby hats on.

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle,
and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There
is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed
all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more
long walks over the Downs and the characters don't all try to behave
as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not al-
ways be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably
the best dull writers.

There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stor-
ies: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they
do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and
too little aware of what goes on in the world. They try to be honest,
but honesty is an art. The poor writer is dishonest without knowing
it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know
what to be honest about. He thinks a complicated murder scheme
which baffles the lazy reader, who won't be bothered itemizing the
details, will also baffle the police, whose business is with details.
The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder
case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute
with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only
thought of two minutes before he pulled it off. But if the writers of
this fiction wrote about the kind of murders that happen, they
would also have to write about the authentic flavor of life as it is
lived. And since they cannot do that, they pretend that what they
do is what should be done. Which is begging the question — ^and the
best of them know it.

In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime^ Dorothy
Sayers wrote: ‘It (the detective story) does not, and by hypothesis
never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement." And she
suggested somewhere else that this is because it is a “literature of
escape" and not “a literature of expression." I do not know what
the loftiest level of literary achievement is: neither did Aeschylus or
Shakespeare; neither does Miss Sayers. Other things being equal,
which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more
powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written

232 Raymond Chandler

about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and
stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and
what he has in him to write it with. As for literature of expression
and literature of escape, this is critics’ jargon, a use of abstract words
as if they had absolute meanings. Everything written with vitality
expresses that vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds.
All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind
the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its
release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at
times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of
the process of life among thinking beings. It is one of the things that
distinguish them from the three-toed sloth; he apparently — one
can never be quite sure — is perfectly content hanging upside down
on a branch, and not even reading Walter Lippman. I hold no par-
ticular brief for the detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say
that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathe-
matics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten
Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile
at the art of living.

I do not think such considerations moved Miss Dorothy Sayers
to her essay in critical futility.

I think what was really gnawing at her mind was the slow reali-
2ation that her kind of detective story was an arid formula which
could not even satisfy its own implications. It was second-grade
literature because it was not about the things that could make first-
grade literature. If it started out to be about real people (and she
could write about them — ^her minor characters show that), they
must very soon do unreal things in order to form the artificial pat-
tern required by the plot. When they did unreal things, they ceased
to be real themselves. They became puppets and cardboard lovers
and papier mach 6 villains and detectives of exquisite and impossi-
ble gentility. The only kind of writer who could be happy with
these properties was the one who did not know what reality was.
Dorothy Sayers’ own stories show that she was annoyed by this trite-
ness; the weakest element in them is the part that makes them detec-
tive stories, the strongest the part which could be removed without
touching the “problem of logic and deduction.” Yet she could not
or would not give her characters their heads and let them make

The Simple Art of Murder 233

their own mystery. It took a much simpler and more direct mind
than hers to do that.

' In the Long Week-End^ which is a drastically competent account
of English life and manners in the decade following the first World
War, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge gave some attention to the
detective story. They were just as traditionally English as the orna-
ments of the Golden Age, and they wrote of the time in which these
writers were almost as well-known as any writers in the world.
Their books in one form or another sold into the millions, and in
a dozen languages. These were the people who fixed the form and
established the rules and founded the famous Detection Club,
which is a Parnassus of English writers of mystery. Its roster in-
cludes practically every important writer of detective fiction since
Conan Doyle. But Graves and Hodge decided that during this
whole period only one first-class writer had written detective stories
at all. An American, Dashiell Hammett. Traditional or not, Graves
and Hodge were not fuddy-duddy connoisseurs of the second rate;
they could see what went on in the world and that the detective
story of their time didn't; and they were aware that writers who
have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not pro-
duce unreal fiction.

How original a writer Hammett really was, it isn't easy to decide
now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group, the only one who
achieved critical recognition, but not the only one who wrote or
tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are
like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole
movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Ham-
mett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is
not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.
Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from
Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl
Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself. A rather revolutionary
debunking of both the language and material of fiction had been
going on for some time. It probably started in poetry; almost every-
thing does. You can take it clear back to Walt Whitman, if you like.
But Hammett applied it to the detective story, and this, because
of its heavy crust of English gentility and American pseudo-
gentility, was pretty hard to get moving. I doubt that Hammett

234 Raymond Chandler

had any deliberate artistic aims whatever; he was trying to make a
living by writing something he had first hand information about.
He made some of it up; all writers do; but it had a basis in fact; it
was made up out of real things. The only reality the English detec-
tion writers knew was the conversational accent of Surbiton and
Bognor Regis. If they wrote about dukes and Venetian vases, they
knew no more about them out of their own experience than the
well-heeled Hollywood character knows about the French Mod-
ernists that hang in his Bel-Air chateau or the semi-antique Chip-
pendale-cum-cobbler’s bench that he uses for a coffee table. Ham-
mett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the
alley; it doesn’t have to stay there foreverj but it was a good idea to
begin by getting as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a
well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing. He wrote at first (and
almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to
life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived
there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street,
Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit
it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at
hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical
fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made
them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these
purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because
it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements.
They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written
in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in
a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech,
and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the
point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.
Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of
Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I be-
lieve this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody,
but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any
more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need
of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no
image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the
story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion
to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and

The Simple Art of Murder 235

over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote
scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

With all this he did not wreck the formal detective story. Nobody
can; production demands a form that can be produced. Realism
takes too much talent, too much knowledge, too much awareness.
Hammett may have loosened it up a little here, and sharpened it a
little there. Certainly all but the stupidest and most meretricious
writers are more conscious of their artificiality than they used to be.
And he demonstrated that the detective story can be important
writing. The Maltese Falcon may or may not be a work of genius,
but an art which is capable of it is not “by hypothesis’* incapable of
anything. Once a detective story can be as good as this, only the
pedants will deny that it could be even better. Hammett did some-
thing else, he made the detective story fun to write, not an exhaust-
ing concatenation of insignificant clues. Without him there might
not have been a regional mystery as clever as Percival Wilde’s In-
quest, or an ironic study 2 ls able as Raymond Postgate’s Verdict of
T welve, or a savage piece of intellectual double-talk like Kenneth
Fearing’s The Dagger of the Mind, or a tragi-comic idealization of
the murderer as in Donald Henderson’s Mr. Bowling Buys a News-
paper, or even a gay and intriguing Hollywoodian gambol like
Richard Sale’s Lazarus No. 7,

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of aware-
ness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a
writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows
how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not
wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing;
dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when
described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than
to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes. There has been so
much of this sort of thing that if a character in a detective story says,
“Yeah,” the author is automatically a Hammett imitator.

And there are still quite a few people around who say that Ham-
mett did not write detective stories at all, merely hard-boiled chron-
icles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped
in like the olive in a martini. These are the flustered old ladies — of
both sexes (or no sex) and almost all ages — ^who like their murders
scented with magnolia blossoms and do not care to be reminded

236 Raymond Chandler

that murder is an act of infinite cruelty, even if the perpetrators
sometimes look like playboys or college professors or nice motherly
women with softly graying hair. There are also a few badly-scared
champions of the formal or the classic mystery who think no story
is a detective story which does not pose a formal and exact problem
and arrange the clues around it with neat labels on them. Such
would point out, for example, that in reading The Maltese Falcon
no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner, Archer
(which is the only formal problem of the story) because the reader
is kept thinking about something else. Yet in The Glass Key the
reader is constantly reminded that the question is who killed Taylor
Henry, and exactly the same effect is obtained; an effect of move-
ment, intrigue, cross-purposes and the gradual elucidation of char-
acter, which is all the detective story has any right to be about
anyway. The rest is spillikins in the parlor.

But all this (and Hammett too) is for me not quite enough. The
realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule
nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment
houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made
their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the finger-
man for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the num-
bers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg
liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where
the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instru-
ment of money-making, where no man can walk down a dark street
in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain
from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad
daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the
crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have
friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony,
and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse
and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, with-
out any but the most perfunctory interference from a political
judge.

It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in,
and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detach-
ment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of
it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes

The Simple Art of Murder 237

funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should
be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite
enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemp-
tion. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity
and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man.
But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself
mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this
kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything.
He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual
man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor,
by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly
without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good
enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private
life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a
duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a
man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively
poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common
man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of
character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s
money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dis-
passionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will
treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He
talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense
of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would
be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him
by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very
safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

Murder Makes Merry
By Craig Rice

Tir7nnrT?nnroTT?nrsTnrvTinr^Trvinnnroir5Tr^^

One of the few contemporary writers of detective fiction who has
been able, successfully and consistently, to wed humor to homicide,
mirth to murder, is the American novelist Craig Rice, known to a
wide audience for the fast-moving John J. Malone and Helene and
Jake Justus mysteries and such classics of cachinnatory crime as
Home Sweet Homicide and The Thursday Turkey Murders. At
the invitation of your editor, Mrs, Rice takes the platform to reveal
— in characteristically informal fashion — some of her innermost
thoughts on this delicate problem,

iUiUUUUUUiUULP 0 0 A 0 0 Q 0 0 0 Q i) Q 0 0. 0 Q Q 0 0 0 P P Q 0 Q 0 A Q 0 P Q 0 ft 0 0 0 0

The girl was young, and incredibly lovely; with honey-colored
hair falling to her shoulders; odd-shaped, almost greenish eyes
framed in lashes long enough to use for water-color brushes, and a
scarlet, sulky, beautiful mouth. She appeared at her best in a close-
fitting white bathing suit that showed her tanned, slender legs to
advantage. She was heiress to several million dollars, and a number
of disgruntled wives suspected her (and rightly) of turning her
charms, full-blast, on their husbands.

By disposition, she was something of a — ^well, let’s say that she
barked, wagged her tail, and chased cats. Everyone hated her, save
the various men who were madly in love with her and couldn’t
make the faintest impression on her Heart-of-Stone.

You know, by this time, that inevitably she is murdered in at
least chapter three. Brutally murdered. Everyone in the cast sus-
pects somebody else, and the reader suspects everybody. The crime
is eventually solved by a blithe and light-hearted young couple, or a
hardboiled dick who gets beaten to a pulp at least five times, or a
pair of whimsical elderly spinsters.

238

Murder Makes Merry 239

In the course of the story, naturally, a charming old snowy-
haired gentleman, (a retired professor of Romance Languages)
stumbles on an important clue, and gets his venerable head bashed
in. The handsome young man with Hollywood ambitions, who
turns out to have been the victim's secret husband (and therefore a
prime suspect) is found under an ancient grey stone culvert, with
his throat cut. And at last, after the sleuth in the case has narrowly
escaped a horrible death, it developes that the murderer was dear
old Aunt Martha, who’d tenderly tended the victim since early
childhood. A case, no doubt, of frustration, poor soul, or of an ille-
gitimate son in Patagonia who would inherit the several millions.^

Some reviewer (and quite possibly myself) is sure to say, “Fun-
niest book I’ve read in years!”

Which sounds a little like, “Ain’t laffed so much since gramps
fell in the well!”

Murder is not mirthful, and there is nothing comic about a
corpse. Ask any squad car dick, or special prosecutor, or medical
examiner. Or, any murderer, if you’re lucky enough to know one.
You’ll be told that there is seldom, if ever, a really hilarious homi-
cide.

In his preface to The Chicago Murders^ Sewell Peaslee Wright
says: . . murderis the ultimate sin; the most abominable crime.”

He also adds that . . murder is a horrid word.”

Encountered in real life (perhaps in this case one should say,
“real death”) murder is, at its worst, frightful and, at its best, sordid.
The victim himself objects to it, in many cases violently. He leaves
behind friends and/or relatives who mourn for him, whose future
lives may very well be ruined by this single act of violence — for
there are very few in this world who do not leave someone to
mourn. The police, the coroner, the D.A.’s office — ^all the authori-
ties have a mess on their hands, and I do mean a mess. And, to be
truthful, it is very seldom that the murderer is happy about it,
either.

Yet the public continues to demand — and get — ^humor with its
homicides, and mirth with its mysteries.

That’s a fact every writer knows. Shakespeare knew it, and used

* Looking these pages over, there appears to be a good plot for a murder mystery.
If no one else uses it first, Fll write it myself! — C.R.

240 Craig Rice

it to good account. Poe knew it (though frankly, Fve had very few
real belly-laughs from Jupiter’s wise-cracks in The Gold Bug),
Conan Doyle knew it, and there are chuckles all through the pages
of the immortal Sherlock. It’s been known for centuries, but Tm
darned if I’ll go digging through all the reference books in the
Public Library for instances to quote, just in order to give the im-
pression that I’m a scholar.

The producers of B pictures know it. And too often come up with
a Quaint Comic Character who is far, far more horrible than the
Monster.

Smart criminal lawyers know it, and so do newspaper reporters.
The tragic and horrible real-life murder becomes a comedy in the
courtroom. You don’t believe me? Go to any murder trial, and
count the laughs.

Something very learned should be said at this point about comic
relief. ... I’d rather quote an instance.

A certain murder trial I covered as a reporter was one of the
grimmest and most harrowing I’ve ever seen or read about. The
defendant, a middle-aged woman, was being tried as accessory be-
fore the fact. The man who had already confessed to the actual mur-
der was a tragic, tubercular little hobo. The victim — the woman’s
lover — ^had been a thoroughly objectionable character who, some
years before, had figured prominently in a murder trial almost as
gruesome as this one.

Most of the defense was based on the character of the victim
(the defense lawyer was nobody’s fool) and the fact that he had
driven the defendant temporarily insane by his abnormal behavior.
Every now and then the details reached a point where the judge
would order all female spectators to leave the courtroom. (He
didn’t bother about female reporters, in fact he didn’t admit that
such a phenomenon existed. Addressing the press table, he invari-
ably said ‘^Gentlemen . . .”)

You get the impression, I trust, that this trial was no laughing
matter. Then came the day when the poor little man who claimed
to have fired the shot was brought from the penitentiary where he
was starting a life term, and placed on the witness stand.

This was the high spot of the trial. Everyone was as tense as an
overtuned harp.

241

Murder Makes Merry

Murderer or not, no one could help feeling a pang of sympathy
for him. About five foot three, weighing about a hundred pounds,
with a pale, frightened face, and dressed in the cheap suit of clothes
the warden had provided for him, he began telling his version of
the actual killing.

Does this seem to you, so far, an occasion for mirth?

It didn’t seem so to the spectators, the judge and the jury. As the
story unfolded, you not only could have heard a pin drop in the
courtroom, you could have heard the echo. In fact, if a pin had
dropped, chances are everybody present would have fainted.

Then came the questions everybody had been waiting to hear:

“What did you do then?”

“I aimed the gun and shot him dead.”

Something almost like a sigh of relief went through the crowded
room.

“And then what happened?”

The poor little guy looked surprised at the question, but he an-
swered it, truthfully.

“He fell down.”

It took fifteen minutes to restore order in the court.

Reading that incident in cold black and white print, does it con-
vulse you with laughter?

Naturally not. But coming at that moment, those three words,
“He fell down,” topped anything ever spoken by Jack Benny or
Bob Hope. It was several minutes before the judge could start call-
ing for order, because he had to straighten out his own face first.

It was simply that the situation had reached a point where every-
body had to laugh, scream, or go crazy. That, perhaps, helps to ex-
plain why humor and homicide go hand in hand.

(Note: I am not going to delve into the psychology of the mystery
novel reader at this point. I’m not nosey. If you want to delve into
your psychology, go to it and good luck to you. But what you come
up with is none of my business.)

But what makes a mystery novel funny?

(Note #2: I am not going to go all-out literary at this point and
discuss What is Humor. Other writers have done it, and better than
I ever could. To me, humor is anything that makes somebody laugh,
somewhere and sometime.)

242 Craig Rice

There is the device of peppering an otherwise plain-and-honest
mystery story with so many brilliant wisecracks that every now and
then the reader doesn't know if he is reading about murder or lis-
tening to Fred Allen. That, for the writer, is the easy method, pro-
viding he is smart enough to think up the wisecracks, or knows a
lot of witty friends and carries a notebook.

There is the device of larding an otherwise heavy story with a
couple of quaint bucolic characters who go around stumbling and
bumbling and getting in everybody's way, and, at intervals, emit-
ting gems of earthy philosophy until you can't see the plot for the
platitudes.

Then there is the situation of the humorously bungling police-
man. This is sure-fire stuff. Practically everyone in this vale of tears
and jeers has, at some time in his life, been scared by and/or mad
at a policeman. Therefore, to make a fool of a cop is all that the
mystery novel detective has to do to make himself a hero. (I know, I
promised to lay off the psychology stuff. I just tossed this in for free.
You take it up from there.)

The cop, regardless of rank, is the fall guy. He's the sand in the
crank case, the worm in the apple, and the flea in the eye of the ama-
teur or professional detective who finally brings the killer to justice.

(This makes for good reading, but not for realism. If you've
ever known any policemen, you'll know right away what I mean.
Whether he's a uniformed guy pounding a beat, or head of a big
city homicide bureau, he’s probably smart, fast-moving, quick-
thinking, and honest. Oh sure, there are exceptions, but not many.
You may read all the mystery novels published, and chuckle over
the way the police are shown up to be a bunch of dopey-joes, but —
if somebody kidnaps your child, or steals your car, or shoots your
butler, what do you do? You call a cop. Chances are he brings back
your child, finds your stolen car, and gets you another butler.)

There is the situation of the innocent bystander who has (i) in-
criminating papers, (2) stolen property, (3) a corpse he has to dis-
pose of in a hurry. Naturally he has a terrible time, and everything
goes wrong.

There is the combining of fabulous, wonderful, and incredible
characters who cook, paint pictures, keep pet mice, collect wood-
carvings, or indulge in such mild hobbies as kleptomania or dipso-

Murder Makes Merry 243

mania. If the writer gets enough of such characters into one story,
the reader will ultimately get so confused that he won’t even care
who committed the crime. In a case like this, it’s a pretty safe bet
that the author didn’t care either.

And we mustn’t forget the situation of the frightened young
female alone in a dark and dreary house where a murder was com-
mitted twenty-two years before. This is one of the best of the avail-
able situations. She’s rented the house, you understand, because
she’s tired, run-down, overworked — ^she’s going mad, madj MAD,
listening to those adding machines all day and going home every
night to her lonely little room, with her memories of the man she
loved and left for the noblest and most spiritual reasons. The man
who will, ultimately, meet her — ^by a curious coincidence — ^in that
dark and dreary house. A dusty old corpse, in which neither of them
has the slightest personal interest, lies between them on the hand-
hewn floor.

It’s been many years since they met. They have much to talk
about. But first, they have to remove the corpse — a tiresome and
unpleasant task. They mutter sweet nothings to each other as they
drag him out to the old boneyard, which providentially came with
the house. She knows that he left her to marry the other girl. But
he explains to her — it was simply that the other girl had money.
Unfortunately, he had been forced to leave her, due to her incur-
able habit of nibbling on phosphorent matches, which made her
glow in the dark.

Having disposed of the rather tiresome corpse, by the simple
process of burying it, they return to the gloomy old mansion. A curi-
ous light appears in the windows. Instead of hailing the nearest
taxi and driving off to South Bend, this couple explores the house.
What do they find? You guess. His first wife, brutally murdered, and
stuffed into the grand piano which was out of tune anyway.

At this point, there enters that unbeatable vaudeville team of the
shrewd detective and the comic cop.

You finish the story. I can’t stand it any longer. I’ll tip you off to
the ending, though. The gal and the guy turn out to be innocent,
and are last seen heading for the nearest marriage license bureau.

Please don’t ask me what makes a mystery novel funny. If I knew
the formula, I’d mimeograph it, sell it to mystery novel writers, and

244 Craig Rice

become the richest woman on earth without doing a lick of work.
And wouldn’t that be a wonderful way to make a livingl

« # #

P.S.: No Bibliography included. I can’t list all the good examples
of Humor-in-Homicide, and I have enough enemies already.

Trojan Horse Opera
By Anthony Boucher

0000000000000 ol) 0000 0 0 00000000000000000000 Oinrriroinnirsi^

An outstanding technical development in the field of crime-
mystery-detective fiction during the years of World War II was the
flowering of the spy story (modern variety) and its near-relative the
novel of suspense. The circumstances and directions of this interest-
ing trend are discussed here by one of the most thoughtful practic-
ing American students of the detective novel. Mr. Boucher is widely
known as the author of such diverting whodunits as The Case of
the Seven of Calvary and The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars;
for the closely-knit "'locked-room*' stories signed by H. H. Holmes;
as a radio writer; and for his valuable and discursive ^'Department
of Criminal Investigation'' in the San Francisco Chronicle, which
in 1946 was awarded the first annual "Edgar" given by Mystery
Writers of America Inc.^ for the best detective story criticism of
the prev'ous year.

iUiUJLSLP 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 p Si 0 0 0 0 p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 p a 0 0 0 0 0 0 0^

That group of novels which publishers and librarians bracket as
“mysteries'" has always been a mixed lot. A “mystery" may be a
problem in deduction, a study in criminal psychology, a farce, or a
love story. And stories of espionage (and their close relatives, the
novels of pure suspense) have always been lumped in as a small part
of this heterogeneous collection.

No longer, however, are they a small part. During the war years,
the mystery has thrown wide open its gates to the Trojan horse.

I have reviewed mystery novels for the San Francisco Chronicle
for over three years. Well over one-fourth of those novels have had
espionage and/or sabotage as a major element of the plot. At
periods the proportion has run as high as a third or even a half of
books received.

345

246 Anthony Boucher

If the spy story were still what it used to be, this state of affairs
would be a major calamity. Only ten years ago, a mystery of any
serious literary pretensions might belong to any of the other sub-
divisions, but certainly not to the espionage category. Spy stuff
meant Oppenheim and Le Queux or at best Van Wyck Mason
(without the F.).

At last Ambler came; and from his Background to Danger (1937,
originally Uncommon Danger) we may date the transfiguration of
the spy story (though perhaps that transfiguration really began, in
another medium, in the film melodramas of Alfred Hitchcock).
Ambler showed that human characterization, good prose, political
intelligence, and above all a meticulously detailed realism, far from
getting in the way of intricate spy adventures, can strengthen them
and raise them to a new plane.

Several post-Ambler factors combined to maintain the new high
level of espionage. One was the success, outside of the strict mystery
market, of such writers as Ethel Vance, Helen Macinnes, and Man-
ning Coles.

Another was the political awareness developed in England after
Munich, which led almost every top-flight mystery writer to save the
Empire from Fascism by the intervention of his star detective.
Margery Allingham’s Traitor's Purse j Nicholas Blake’s ^he Smiler
with the Knife j Michael Innes’ The Secret Vanguard brought to
international espionage a literacy and dexterity hitherto lavished
on purely private murder. Perhaps the most surprising of these war-
time conversions was that of Peter Cheyney, hitherto a mediocre
imitator of Hammett, who developed, in such novels as Dark Duet^
an astonishing ability to make fictional espionage sound as im-
mediate and convincing as the best factual report on the agents of
the late Admiral Canaris.

The American spy novel lagged behind the British. One princi-
pal cause is readily evident. What brought the British spy story to
life was the realization that espionage isn’t an exotic diversion in-
volving deftly draped damsels with Lynn Fontanne laughs lolling
luringly on the private yacht of the Prince of Ruritania, but a prac-
tical commercial pursuit which might penetrate any ordinary hum-
drum life — ^particularly yours. It is largely the this-could-happen-
to-me feeling that gives the new spy novel its impact.

Trojan Horse Opera 1^47

And we in America, up till Pearl Harbor, knew damned well it
couldn't happen to us, don’t be silly, so why write about it?

But the past three years have closed the gap between British and
American endeavors, with David Keith, Richard Lockridge, Helen
McCloy, Kenneth Millar, Darwin Teilhet, Robert Terrall, and
Mitchell Wilson (to name only a handful) utilizing all the best de-
vices of the new school with the American setting to add immediacy.

Even in other languages, the spy story seems to be booming. Nor-
way offered us a superlative example in Axel Kielland’s Shape of
Danger; Manuel Peyrou and Diego Keltiber write of the Fascist
infiltration in South America; and France offers espionage as di-
verse as the shoddy colportage of Valentin Mandelstamm and the
beauty and reality of Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows.

The spy novel, in short, stands now where the strict detective
story stood in the late 'twenties. An old-established hack form, it is
at last coming into its own under the leadership of a group of writ-
ers who know that humor, understanding, humanity, and good
prose are not amiss in any form.

Like the mystery novel, the spy story is a literary microcosm. It
includes the leisurely literary novel (Michael Innes), the grim hard-
boiled school (Peter Cheyney, Charles L. Leonard), the social com-
edy of manners (Ngaio Marsh), the light adventure farce (Oliver
Weld Bayard), and so on down to the purest romantic trash, wherein
Cinderella foils the Nazis to get her Prince.

That this flowering of the spy story should come in war time is
understandable enough. But why this war should produce such
results where the last emphatically did not (perhaps the only satis-
factory spy fiction from World War I is Maugham’s Ashenden —
published ten years after the war) is harder to explain.

One reason — ^perhaps the principal — ^is the coincidence of the
war with a certain stage in the development of mystery fiction. The
detective story made its first appeal through the ingenuity of its plot
and the eccentricities of its detective. By now all plot-ingenuities
seem to have been exhausted (though such rare masters as Carr and
Queen can still produce them regularly), and one detective has be-
come painfully like another.

The reading public, satiated with these factors, has come to de-
mand more and more a heightening of the element of pure sus-

248 Anthony Boucher

pense. For certain minds there can be sufficient suspense to carry
them through 80,000 words in the unraveling o£ a perfect puzzle;
but even such minds can find no such satisfaction in the average
mystery of today. Like MacLeish’s Hamlet, they know the answers
— all the answers. It is the question that they want to know; and
that question must be something urgent, vital — a matter of life and
death to the protagonist, not merely a pretty puzzle.

As that master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, says in the intro-
duction to his recent anthology of Suspense Stories:

This difference [between the pure suspense story and the element
of suspense necessary to all narration] lies in the fact that Suspense
is here accompanied by Danger — danger mysterious and unknown,
if possible. Or, if the danger is known — then as inexorable or as
insurmountable peril as may be imagined.

Obviously such inexorable and insurmountable peril can most
readily be achieved within the framework of an espionage story. In
a private murder, your hero is pitted only against a single antago-
nist, however sinister; in a story of criminal warfare, only against a
limited gang. But the protagonist who is a spy, counter-spy, or Un-
derground agent must face the combined forces of an entire nation
or Axis of nations. His enemies are unknown; the parish priest or
the Fuller brush man is equally apt to be his deadly destroyer.

A few writers have developed the suspense aspect of the mystery
story without recourse to international implications. Notably Elisa-
beth Sanxay Holding and Cornell Woolrich (and/or William Irish)
have achieved effects of suspenseful terror which any spy practi-
tioner might envy. The trend is undoubtedly growing — its influ-
ence appears in such relatively “straight’’ detectival writers as
Anthony Gilbert. Now that the end of the war has made the spy
story nominally less topical (I have, for instance, had stories about
Nach Niederlage German activities rejected as “not entertain-
ment”; whereas the activities of wartime Nazis apparently were en-
tertaining in the extreme), there will doubtless be much further de-
velopment of this privately motivated suspense story. But where the
spy writer found the reader already prepared to shudder at the
menace presented, only a writer as skilful as a Holding or a Wool-

Trojan Horse Opera 249

rich can attain the same effect with a freshly-created, small-scale
situation.

What the future of the spy story is may be debated. It is at least
likely that readers, as well as reviewers, are fed up with the intrusion
of the spy element into the routine detective story — the sort of
thing in which the munitions magnate, apparently murdered by
one of his heirs for good oldfashioned profit, was really assassinated
by the secretary who had one German grandmother and is therefore
obviously a Nazi agent. (For a fine variation, see Mrs. Christie’s
The Patriotic Murders.)

More and more, in peace time, the spy story proper will probably
be subordinated to the private suspense story. Already, for instance,
Mitchell Wilson has abandoned espionage to write, in None So
Blindj what he calls a straight novel, but what is simply an applica-
tion of the mystery-suspense technique to a situation of purely per-
sonal emotions.

The books that still treat directly of spies will probably move
further and further away from the whodunit, subordinating the
mystery-detection-surprise element (rarely too strong in them) to
study of character, the mechanics of intrigue, and pure suspense.
Michael Hardt’s A Stranger and Afraid and Katherine Roberts’
Private Report have already exemplified what is not so much a spy
novel as a novel which happens to have a spy as protagonist.

Whatever its future, the new spy novel seems to be second only to
the personal narrative as the characteristic fresh development in
letters of World War II; and it has shown possibilities as the most
effectively pamphleteering form of popular fiction. One can already
envisage the future Ph.D. dissertations on The Espionage Novel of
the ip4o'Sj with special reference to .

For one generation’s meat is the next generation’s kitchen mid-
den; and those future literary archeologists may find the new spy
novel by no means the least enlightening of our remains.

Afternote: I seem to have discussed exclusively the spy novel,
with almost no reference to espionage in the mystery short story.
The omission is of no consequence. All that needs to be said about
the spy short has been said superlatively well by Vincent Starrett in
his anthology World's Great Spy Stories (Forum, 1944).

Dagger of the Mind
By James Sandoe

inrT?rr?nrTinnryTinrTir?nnnnrV7^^

That the roads to mystery are many and varied has been more than
hinted at in this chapter. In the selection just preceding^ Mr.
Boucher has ably analyzed the nature and relationships of the spy
story and what we call the suspense or pursuit story. Close kin to
the latter^ but less external^ more interior in its workings^ is the
modern tale of terror, often termed the ''psychological thriller''
(with what accuracy Mr. Sandoe will determine). One of the most
fascinating mutations of the crime-detective novel in recent years —
and one of its most promising avenues for the future — this new,
yet old, addition to the genre is examined by Mr. Sandoe in a bril-
liant and penetrating piece of contemporary scholarship. A member
of the bibliography and English faculties at the University of Colo-
rado, James Sandoe has won increasing respect in recent years as a
critic and chronicler of modern literature^ with special attention to
crime and police fiction. The selection which represents him here
was originally delivered as an invitation lecture in the Modern Arts
Series sponsored by Poetry Magazine and was subsequently re-
printed^ in the present condensation, in that journal for June 1946.

0 0 p ff 0 0 p <5 0 0 0 p Q 0 0 Q p 0 j? 0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 ^ 0 0 0 p 0 0

I MAY AS WELL confess at the outset that through the course of my
remarks I am going to pay very little attention to the philological
distinction between the word **terror” and the word ^‘horror.”
There is a perfectly clear distinction between them: terror is intense
fear or dread and horror is the same fear or dread mingled with re-
pugnance or loathing* Horror is the more complex emotion and,
presumably, the more overwhelming. And, unlike fear, it is an

250

Dagger of the Mind 251

emotion that cannot be felt persistently. Fear’s keen knife may cut
and cut insatiably; it is a delicate torture at its most refined, and
never more agonizing than when we invent it in our minds for use
upon ourselves. Horror may recur but it cannot be sustained; it
dulls the senses. And very few writers have attempted successfully to
sustain horror without relief. It is too anesthetic. For my purposes
here, horror and terror, while not synonymous are good companions
and any attempt to do without either or devote ourselves to one
makes for distinctions refined beyond use.

The varieties of literary experience are nearly infinite. The sub-
jects about which books may be written are incredibly numerous
and the treatment of any one subject is staggeringly diverse. Even
within a relatively small range diversity is often very great. One
speaks of the detective story as if it were a plain enough fact. But
within the detective story there is exceedingly various company and
the detective story, after all, has one exceedingly important physical
limitation. It must pose a question (whodunit?) and it must answer
that question. It may do so as plainly as a jigsaw puzzle or it may
deck its puzzle out in the most infinite furbelows of character and
atmosphere and setting. Its variety is great, but its variety is of dec-
oration rather than of structure — ^and this is so even when it stands
on its head and tells the story of a murderer rather than the story
of his detection.

The horror story ranges more freely because horror imposes no
structure but rather an emotion, a feeling. And there is no retreat,
however sheltered, to which horror may not penetrate. We find it in
the newspapers, called tragedy. A child crushed by a truck or dis-
membered by a madman. The most placid and contented of house-
holds obliterated at Sunday dinner by a falling airplane. Horror
' “has no limit nor is circumscribed within one place.”

A good many writers, from Coleridge to Edmund Wilson, have
tried to discover the reason why men engage in what Dorothy Say-
ers calls “the art of self-tormenting” by reading horror stories. Their
explanations are all valid in some degree. But none seems sufficient
to explain the cause or the effect of the diversity of horrors which
literature contains.

252 James Sandoe

Perhaps the first sort o£ tale which the phrase “horror story’’
brings to mind is the story o£ the supernatural. Stories of witchcraft,
of evil fairies, of vampires and werewolves, of ghosts and all the ar-
ray of the kingdom of evil to the Prince of Darkness himself. These
are all ancient conceptions and most of them were serving writers
and readers admirably some centuries ago. Christopher Marlowe
transformed a wandering German legend into a play whose ultimate
physical horror was the palpable rending of Faustus by a host of
demons; but its most horrible lines are still the infinitely despairing
confession of Mephistopheles. He has been goaded by Faustus’
skeptical curiosity to tell him .something of the nature of Hell:

F. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

M. Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.

Think*st thou that I, who saw the face of God
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

The torture of Mephistopheles is a torment of the mind, more
racking than torment of his body.

The story of the supernatural, despite our pride in skepticism,
has by no means vanished from the earth. We can still find a very
genuine pleasure in horror when, lending ourselves to an author’s
wiles, we settle down to read a tale of the impossible.

Unfortunately, however, the old formulae lack novelty. The first
ghost we meet, and the first vampire, are far more terrifying than
the second and the third. The whole machinery of ghosts and pol-
tergeists is nearly bound to be fascinating when one meets it first.
But, this first acquaintance over, the novelty vanishes and it is only
a very skillful artist or juggler who can make the now familiar im-
possibilities immediate. Custom “makes it an easiness” in us.

Only a very few of the writers who have conjured up supernatural
horrors can, in the end, be relied upon to horrify us at all. And of
them the older masters, while we may bow in theory to their enter-
prise, seem often more laborious than effective. Of the acknowl-
edged masters of the more conventional story of the supernatural,
I find few as steadily palatable as M. R. James, the Cambridge don

Dagger of the Mind 253

who found horrid, possessive creatures in cloistered studies, in
Canon Alberic’s scrapbook, in an old mezzotint. Part of James’ lin-
gering effectiveness lies, I think, in the half-jocular mode of his tale-
telling. The stories of Sheridan Le Fanu, the master he acknowl-
edged, are only rarely as satisfying. And this, I think, is because they
are wordy. Le Fanu is usually laboring meticulously toward a dis-
covery we have made for ourselves before in other pages. And when
his characters suffer blankly through ten thousand words at the end
of which they come, thunderstruck, upon a vampire, the reader —
already acquainted with vampires — ^will have written them off as
blockheads for their delay.

Still, among Le Fanu’s tales there are a few which seem peren-
nially capable of shocking us (Madam CrowVs Ghost, Mr. Justice
Harbottle are two) and from the history of the tale of terror a good
many more have been plucked by anthologists of varying tastes. In
every collection are a few stories capable of affecting all but the most
obdurate reader. And for this reason I do not believe we can allow
Edmund Wilson’s contention that the ghost story is ‘'an obsolete
form . . . killed by the electric light,” capable of flourishing only
during the era of candle light and merely surviving the hot glare
of gas light. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Wilson’s insistence is more ar-
bitrary than thoughtful. The electric light has been turned on,
without question; but like the radio it can be turned off.

Still, I was for a time inclined to agree with Julius Fast who, in
presenting his collection of fantastic stories. Out of This World,
observed that he had omitted all ghost stories “because long ago the
last original ghost plot was hashed to death along with vampires
and werewolves. . . . We can use them to scare children but all
too often their only response in an adult audience is half-amused
tolerance.”

But Out of This World disproves this very contention. Its first
story is John Collier’s “Evening Primrose,” a haunting and very
nasty little ghost story indeed. To be sure. Collier never calls them
ghosts. And he sets his tale in the bustling coziness of a huge depart-
ment store — sets it there after closing hours, from dusk to dawn,
and peoples it with a hierarchy of bloodless, transparent creatures
that once were men but who are certainly now ghosts in what is un-
questionably a new ghost story and a lingeringly horrid one.

254 James Sandoe

Writers themselves have seemed to feel the limitations of the
old machinery. Late in the nineteenth century and with the earlier
stirrings of the science of psychology, writers began to forego the
palpable and horrid creatures of ancient legend for the impalpable
monsters which are the products of the mind.

For horror, as we have said, is by no means confined to super-
natural creatures, solid or impalpable. Horror, especially physical
horror, is a part of a great many novels which have nothing to do
with fantasy, and during the past year we have seen pictorial evi-
dence of physical horror on a scale so tremendous that it cannot be
grasped. Indeed, I wonder whether any of the older horrors — mere
vampires and warlocks — can remain horrible in the flash of the
atomic bomb. And I wonder even more whether the thoughtful
reader can find imaginary terrors — these witches and demons — ^half
as shocking as he could before he saw the pictures of Belsen and
Dachau. For of all the horrors, the most horrifying still is the most
obvious one of all, the most evident, the most widespread — the hor-
ror of man's inhumanity to man.

Ill

My concern here, though, is the innocently calculated horror of
the storyteller, especially with what is known as the ''psychological
horror story" or the "psychological thriller.” According to Anthony
Boucher, the "psychological thriller” is primarily a gleam in a pub-
lisher's eye.

Publishers love detective stories because they have a basement
of sales. That is the blessing and the curse of the detective stoiy as
an article of merchandise. Rental libraries are so many and their
readers so hungry that almost any detective story, good or bad, will
sell automatically at least fifteen hundred copies, whereas a straight
novel, even a good one, may sell as few as two hundred.

But if mysteries in their original editions have a basement of sales,
they have a ceiling of sales as welL Mysteries comprise about a fourth
of all the fiction published in this country; but it is a rare mystery
that sells more than, say, fifteen thousand copies. The public is
enormously fond of mystery stories but it rents or borrows them; it
doesn't buy them. This is true, I have no doubt, because of some

Dagger of the Mind 255

lingering feeling that they are not absolutely respectable, and partly
from the easy view that when you’ve read one, when you’ve dis-
covered the name of the murderer, the story is finished forever, and
need never be looked at again.

Now a publisher with a promising manuscript — a manuscript,
say, like Margaret Millar’s The Iron Gates — ^will naturally hesitate
to call it a detective story and so, almost infallibly, limit its sales.
Random House called The Iron Gates “a psychological novel” and
from the evidences of its advertising, must have sold a good many
more copies than would have been sold without such merchan-
dising.

But if the “psychological thriller” is a publisher’s device, it is also
a phrase that appears to have a meaning of some sort for critics and
readers as well. Psychology is the science which explores the mind.
A thriller, in its broadest sense, is any tale bent on describing and
transmitting excitement. Some sort of definition Height be ham-
mered out from this pair, but it would describe astonishingly few
of the many novels which have been called “psychological thrillers.”
The phrase is imposing, it 'makes a show of being scientific and
hence serious, and it is fashionable. It is as fashionable as the phrase
“Gothick tale” was a hundred years ago. Now the “psychological
thriller” is the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic tale, and
they are both much more accurately, if less impressively, described
simply as tales of terror.

The psychological thriller need not be regarded as a kind of
special development of the detective story. But it tends to be re-
garded so just the same. And I am willing enough to seize this as a
convenience. Certainly, within the range of the detective story
there is more than enough matter for discussion.

In a sense every detective story must, at least in theory, be a
psychological novel because it must, at the last, explain why one
man’s mind was bent away from the horror or the fear of killing
long enough to commit murder in spite of the great personal and
social barriers against it. And rarely one finds a detective story
which manages an analysis of motive in a manner more than merely
perfunctory.

The first step from the conventional detective story toward a
psychological thriller might be the sort of step which Freeman Wills

256 James Sandoe

Crofts took when he first forsook the dry time-table sort of tale for
which he is best known, to write his story as the murderer knew it.
Nobody is normally less concerned with fine-spun analysis of crim-
inal motives than Mr. Crofts. His particular genius is the meticulous
piecing together of a literary jigsaw. This was true of his first novel,
The Casky in 1920, and has been true of most of its successors. All of
his energies are bent toward discovering the identity and the means
of the criminal; and when the flaw in the time-table has been discov-
ered the criminal’s alibi is broken and there is little time left to
explore the motive for his murder. Mr. Crofts tacks on any one of
the acceptable, standard brands — ^fear, revenge, gain — and lets it
go at that.

But Crofts has written another sort of detective story. The sort
which Howard Haycraft calls the “inverted” detective story, the
story of a crime told before its solution. (When Dostoievski wrote
Crime and Punishment, critics were content to call it a novel, but
since the advent of the detective story, a naggingly various form,
critical terminology has become much more meticulous.)

In Willful and Premeditated, Crofts set himself to tell first the ac-
count of the slow growth of the idea of murder in the mind of
Charles Swinburn, his preparations and his success and his failure to
escape detection. Here Crofts began with motive and here, for once,
detection is as much compressed as motive had been in his earlier
novels. Financial trouble, an ill-advised passion for a disagreeable
female, sympathy for his workmen in the plant and irritation at his
useless, rich, suspicious uncle combine to suggest murder and to
make it breed. The novel is meticulously cumulative and thor-
oughly absorbing. Absorbing most of all because we share in the
struggle which goes on within the mind of the wretched protagonist.

Thus Freeman Wills Crofts has written the tale of detection at
its most dryly calculated and has taken a first step toward the psycho-
logical thriller as it explores the mind of a murderer. Of course he
was by no means the first to do so. The struggle is nearly as old as
man and its chroniclers have been multitudinous:

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

Dagger of the Mind 257

The Thane of Cawdor strides gigantically and piteously among the
company.

Even among contemporary detective story writers, Crofts was by
no means the first to deal at length with the mind of the murderer;
nor is he the most considerable, if we recall only Francis lies and
Richard Hull among the others.

Lately, though, there has been an increasing tendency on the part
of writers to explore more morbid states of the murderous mind.
From relatively simple aberration they venture into conditions of
mind still further from the norm, into the twisting ways of psycho-
pathology.

A very striking example of this is Patrick Hamilton’s tale of a
schizophrenic. Hangover Square; or. The Man With Two Minds.
This is the unhappy history of George Bone, caught by his own in-
anition, snarled hopelessly in his dull passion for a selfish, useless,
beautiful little slut, and dragged down by his own goaded madness.
George’s two minds are the mind of the tongueless and loutish lover,
and the other, the schizophrenic mind in revolt which has two per-
fectly clear objectives: to kill Netta and to go to the childish memory
of a haven at Maidenhead. He goes there at last, having killed Netta
and her most obnoxious lover and then finds that Maidenhead is no
Nirvana. So, his two minds satisfied at last that they cannot find sat-
isfaction, he turns on the gas.

Patrick Hamilton tells his story subjectively. We see Earl’s Court
(Hangover Square) through one or the other of George’s two minds.
Hamilton has ventured from the cool objectivity of the psychiatrist’s
study inside the mind of his patient. And in the fullest, most gen-
uine sense of the term this is a psychological thriller, an anatomy of
madness. But when the last page has been turned it is still, as well,
the story of Hangover Square and its vicious, idle coterie of para-
sites — the company the wretched George has fallen into, the com-
pany to which he has been chained by his love and hate for Netta.

Hangover Square is far more genuinely a psychological thriller
than a good many other novels which have been given the name.
One other sort, in particular, has been given the name and a good
deal of admiring attention recently. This other sort may be said to
operate on the eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too plan. Its most spectacu-
lar exponent is Mrs, Margaret Millar who began a few years ago

258 James Sandoe

writing detective stories in which the sleuth was a psychiatrist, and
who more recently has written two novels, both very highly praised,
which attempt to combine the fascination of a clinical history with
the charms of a detective story and its last minute surprise.

In Wall of Eyes, Mrs. Millar concerns herself with an oddly sorted
household dominated by a blind and vindictive younger sister who
holds her power by holding the family purse-strings. To be sure,
this presumed an unsympathetic limpness on the part of her vic-
tims — the father, drained by his wife; the housekeeper-sister; the
simple, hulking brother; the young and sensitive pianist — ^but Mrs.
Millar’s skill mitigated this in part. The blind tyrant is murdered
and the ultimate object of the tale is the object of any detective
story: to uncover the murderer.

But the method of the narrative is to present the tale through the
perceptions of its characters and obviously, if she is to keep her
murderer a secret, Mrs. Millar must at the same time lose her richest
opportunity for exploring the murderer’s mind. She must so sharply
select his thoughts that she presents him piecemeal until, after all,
it appears that what we have had is not a psychological study but
some exceedingly adept sleight-of-hand. We have been in the fairly
improbable position of sharing a murderer’s mind fully, except for
what after all must be occupying most of it — the matter of murder
itself.

Mrs. Millar’s latest novel. The Iron Gates, uses the same tech-
nique. Once more she is dealing with an uneasily ingrown family.
At first the narrative is directed chiefly through the consciousness
of Lucille Morrow, second wife of a distinguished gynecologist
whose first wife has been hacked to death some years earlier while
returning from an evening at her successor’s house. The author es-
tablishes very deftly the pride of the second Mrs. Morrow in her
possession of her husband, marks easily her humorous tyranny over
him and the enmity felt toward her by her two stepchildren. And
then, suddenly, after a ragged stranger’s visit to deliver a box, Lu-
cille disappears. Later she is found, raving. The second part of the
novel describes her short stay behind the iron gates — the protecting
gates — of Penwood asylum. But the gates are not impregnable, and
Lucille’s overwhelming fear that she will be murdered (why she

Dagger of the Mind 259

fears we do not know; we share her fear but not its source) drives
her to suicide. The third part of the novel is the unraveling, the di-
agnosis of madness and of murder’s motive. Once more Mrs. Millar’s
concern has been to observe the workings of the terrified mind. But
she has insisted, as well, upon hiding the causes of the terror so that
she can surprise us at the last. And because of this, it would be a good
deal more accurate to call her novel not a psychological novel but a
tale of terror. For as a psychological study it is, by its own limita-
tions, necessarily superficial.

Mrs. Millar is one of several younger writers who have given a
new and various life to that sort of tale of terror which was for so
long bogged in the celebrated Had-I-But-Known morass. The
shrinking heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho uttered that un-
fashionable phrase in spirit if not in fact. And a century and a half
of shrinking heroines have echoed it, especially since the building
of The Circular Staircase, with resounding silliness.

Occasionally there is a writer — ^like Lenore Glen Offord — ^who
can make sense of the old formula by the simple application of taste
and good sense. Her Skeleton Key is an excellent example of a self-
respecting tale in the old tradition. And before her emotion became
as overblown as her later settings, Mabel Seeley was a memorable
writer of this sort. More exotic variations have been performed by
Dorothy B. Hughes whose best novels — The Blackbirder, The Deli-
cate Ape — ^are superlatively skillful tales of pursuit and escape; by
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding in her stories of half-understood horrors
viewed in a nightmare of uncertainties. The list might be extended
by many names but this is enough to suggest the variety and the rich
promise of the form.

All of these writers are concerned, if very differently, with the
tale of terror; but their methods are nearly as diverse as their capa-
cities. Cornell Woolrich is in some ways the most superb and garish
literary juggler of the lot and his special capacity has been to per-
form a series of variations on what will be remembered as the puzzle
of the vanishing lady.

You will recall the story of the girl and her mother who arrived
in Paris one afternoon during the year of the Exposition, went to
a crowded hotel and were assigned to different rooms, whereupon

26 o James Sandoe

the mother vanished as completely as if she had never existed while
all the world seemed bent upon denying to the frantic girl that she
had ever existed.

The theme is common property and its variations nearly as many
as those of the equally celebrated puzzle of the locked room. The
essence of this sort of tale is the discovery of the inexplicable within
the circle of the ordinary. One of Cornell Woolrich’s most facile
variations was the one he called Phantom Lady and published under
the name of William Irish.

Woolrich has sought and found terror not where one has been
led to expect it — in the graveyard at midnight, in the deserted-
haunted house — but in the streets of the city. He shows fear stalking
the subway and walking along Broadway, fear all the more striking
for making its way boldly through crowds in the light of day.

But while his skill in contriving variations is staggering, his
stories are inclined in retrospect to seem more than a little absurd.
To seem, that is, as staged as they are. Woolrich has a facility for
catching the reader's attention with a striking situation and then
bustling him from shock to shock with a kind of numbing swiftness.
The mere facility is apparent only after the last page has been
turned and then if one is so unwise as to glance back, the tale itself
vanishes into incredibility, very much as Eurydice vanished when
Orpheus forsook his vow and turned to look at her before she
crossed the threshold of Hell.

And very much the same thing is true of a good many of the tales
of espionage that have been published in such quantity during the
last five years. The spy story had languished in the doldrums for a
good many years when Eric Ambler gave it a fresh wind. The spy
story flourishes on his account — ^and on the more obvious account of
war — ^but its really successful practitioners are still very few.

Eric Ambler took over the form in a sad state of disrepair. Buchan
had forsaken it, largely, and the heavy dominance of E. Phillips Op-
penheim had grown excessively tedious. Ambler took the spy story
by the scruff of its well-washed neck, whipped the monocle out of its
astonished eye and pushed it down among people, away from the
world of diplomatic mummies. One of his earliest novels, Epitaph
for a Spy^ has as its hero a most unheroic young Czech teacher of
languages on vacation in a small Mediterranean fishing village. He

26 i

Dagger of the Mind

is not sleek and polished and experienced, but diffident and fright-
ened and bewildered; as a man without a country, as a stranger
among unconcerned and unsympathetic foreign laws, he must be-
come, however unwillingly, a catspaw for the police as they reach
for the real spy. The real spy, once discovered, is equally unheroic
and his epitaph is a shabby little phrase and a very revealing one:
‘‘He needed the money.*' Maugham's Ashenden knew this twenty
years before, but he was unique.

Ambler brought to the spy story, with this new realism, a literacy
that nobody had bothered to expend on it for years. He brought as
well a political awareness before it was fashionable, and I trust that
he will maintain it in his later novels when that now fashionable
awareness has faded away as it seems already to be fading.

Equally unheroic is the almost anonymous protagonist (he is
called only D.) of Graham Greene's novel. The Confidential Agent,
which as far surpasses Eric Ambler's admirable tales in skill and in
depth as Ambler’s tales surpass the laborious scintillation of Oppen-
heim. The Confidential Agent is a study of fear and defeat. It is not
Greene's best novel but it is a fine and a sensitive one. Its protago-
nist, D., has been a professor of Romance languages in a Spanish
university; he is a scholar of some renown and we see him, landing
in England from his war-torn country, on a mission for the Loyal-
ists, He is middle-aged and he has suffered, with a people, such rack-
ing agonies, physical and spiritual, that he has only one emotion left
— fear, '‘One of the things which danger does to you after a time
is— well, to kill emotion. I don’t think I shall ever feel anything
again except fear,"

His duty in England is to buy coal. “If Lord Benditch chose to
sell his coal at a price they were able to pay, they could go on for
years; if not, the war might be over before the spring." He is a lonely
man in a hostile world. “Danger was part of him. It wasn't like your
overcoat you sometimes left behind; it was your skin. You died with
it; only corruption stripped it from you. The person you trusted was
yourself."

He can trust no one, depend upon no one but himself. There-
fore he has no faith in the whimsical if friendly gesture of the peer's
loud daughter- And he manages only after a series of agonizing
doubts to believe in the honesty of a hotel slavey to whom he trusts

262 James Sandoe

his papers out of necessity. When he has found her faithful, his ene-
mies among his friends push her out of a window and he is alone
again.

On its physical plane, the action in The Confidential Agent is as
rapid and as brutal as it is in Ambler’s Journey into Fear, Where
Greene’s novel surpasses Ambler’s is in its brooding speculation and
in its intellectual analysis of fear, in its remorseless exploration of
human selfishness, and in D.’s bleak mistrust of man and of himself.
D.’s story, for all that he has found a limited faith at the last and is
no longer quite alone, is a profoundly depressing exploration of
man’s insensitivity, of man’s brutality and greed and preoccupation
with himself.

With all this, it is more hopeful than an earlier and a more am-
bitious novel which I should like to use as my text of the ultimate
horror. We have come a considerable distance away from the ghosts
and the goblins, the things that go bump in the night. The devil in
the bottle is a futile and comic little monster when the magazine
beside it shows the bodies piled high at Belsen and the impassive
face of the young monster who tortured them.

But I see a horror even beyond this intentional sadism. It is the
unintentional sadism of the passive, the horrifying spectacle not of
slaughtered innocents but of preoccupied innocence. And this is a
horror ruthlessly observed in Graham Greene’s appalling novel,
Brighton Rock,

Brighton Rock is the story of Pinkie, the Kid, the precocious head
of a gang at Brighton. Its plot is an assembly of violence. The gang
kills a reporter who was involved with a rival gang in the murder of
their own former leader. When a member of his own gang threatens
to turn informer through fear, Pinkie shoves him over a rickety
banister and breaks his neck. Pinkie himself dies hideously, his face
splashed with vitriol and his body broken from a fall over a cliff.

But the physical violence, terrible as it is, is only the shadow of
the violence within the boy’s twisted mind. It is a mind ruled by
fear: by the fear of sinking back into the slum he remembers with
loathing, by the fear of women, and his loathing of what those same
slums have taught him of sex, by fear of being caught and hanged.
In spite of his loathing, he marries a blindly adoring little waitress
to shut her mouth because she is able to witness against him. She

Dagger of the Mind 263

sees nothing of his motive and scrapes up a dream from the penny
romances, a dream of which he is the hero. In her access of happiness
she says, “Life’s not so bad.” “Don’t you believe it,” he answers,
“I’ll tell you what it is. It’s jail, it’s not knowing where to get some
money. Worms and cataract, cancer. . . . It’s dying slowly.”

And at the end, racked by his death but proud and hopeful be-
cause she is carrying his child, she walks back to her shabby room
to play the record he has made for her on Brighton pier, her gift
from him. And so, Greene says as the novel concludes, “She walked
rapidly in the June sunlight toward the worst horror of all.” For
we have heard him as he made the record, his frantic, bitter virgin-
ity crying out desperately. And the message she will hear is his
agonized cry against her, “God damn you, you little bitch, why can’t
you go back home forever and let me be?”

Pinkie’s mind is as vicious as the little razor blade he can fit under
his thumbnail to slash his enemies. Greene shows it to us in a hun-
dred different aspects and against the flyblown grubby setting of
raucous piers and grand hotels and shallow, selfish people bent on
mindless fun and games. He shows Pinkie’s mind taking a malicious
delight in friendly farewells as he escorts the craven Spicer to the
racetrack where he expects Spicer to be cut to death; and he shows
Pinkie’s mind, shocked and hurt, when his body bleeds from slashes
dealt out impartially to the lamb and his shepherd by the rival gang;
he shows Pinkie’s mind writhing in torment at the drink and at the
flesh he must meet in his race away from fear. But behind Pinkie’s
mind are the place and the people who have twisted it.

And there is a kind of compassion for Pinkie in the view of the
larger greed, the enormous, inanimate selfishness of society which
has spawned this mad little mind. For there is something even more
horrible in the viciousness of inanition than in the calculated
viciousness of the man who sets out to do wrong, taking pleasure in
it. The real villain of Brighton Rock is not Pinkie, nasty as he is,
but mankind which has let him become so.

Once more, set the gnarled imaginings of the writer of ghost
stories against the gnarled realities of our society, and the real, the
ultimate horror is always the horror of man’s inhumanity to man.

Clues

By Marie F. Rodell

00000000000000000000 jfo 00 oooooooodooooooooooo^ooooooo'

Whether the writing of whodunits — or^ for that matter ^ any kind of
writing — can ever be successfully taught is a moot question. None-
theless^ in a form as technically exacting as mystery fiction^ an un-
derstanding of the basic problems of craftsmanship can be helpful
to the beginner. The most useful handbook on the subject to date
is Marie F, RodelVs Mystery Fiction: Theory & Technique {New
York:Duellj Sloan & Pearce^ ^943)> Presently editor of Duellj Sloan
6* Pearce's ‘'Bloodhound Mysteries^' Mrs. Rodell was previously
associated with the house of Morrow, has written Grim Grow the
Lilacs and other whodunits under the pen-name of Marion Ran-
dolph, and has lectured on the theory and practice of mystery fic-
tion at New York University. The chapter on clues, reprinted here
from her book by special permission, will be no less engrossing to
the mystery addict as a conducted behind-the-scenes tour than to the
neophyte writer for its practical hints.

iUJjRJQn 90 0 000 QOOOOOfiOOOOOOQ(ta9ftOQ53SQOOQO(iQOOOO<iOOOQ^O.

Clues are the traces o£ guilt which the murderer leaves behind
him. Whether they are tangible, material things, like a button
torn oj0E at the scene of the crime; or personal traces like footprints
or fingerprints; or whether they are intangible habit patterns or
character traits, they are the signposts leading detective and reader
in the right — or sometimes wrong — direction.

A clue is seldom in itself a proof of guilt. It is the deductions
which the detective makes from it which are significant; it is be-
cause of these deductions, and where they lead him, that eventu-
ally that button may prove the murderer’s undoing.

A good clue, then, is one which does in fact point in the right
direction, but which seems at first to point in the wrong direction,

264

Clues

265

to mean something other than it does, or to point nowhere at all.

The tangible clues are those actual objects the forgetful mur-
derer leaves behind him, and any other things which can be de-
tected by any of the senses. A scent of a particular perfume, a tune
whistled at a significant moment, a strange taste to a bit of food,
or something odd about the texture of a cloth or leather — these
may all be clues. Only one thing is required of them: that they
be such that they can adequately be described in words. The
reader sees, hears, tastes, smells or feels these clues only as they
are described to him. A whiff of perfume must be characterized if
it is to mean anything to the reader, who cannot smell it from
the page: it may be pungent, or sickeningly sweet; it may be rose
or jasmine or carnation; or, more subtly, it may evoke certain re-
actions in the detective, which are always the same whenever he
smells that particular perfume. In that case, the reader recognizes
the recurrence of the clue by the way in which it affects the detec-
tive, not by the aroma of the clue itself.

A tune or bit of music can of course be represented on a page
in music note form, and most people, even if they cannot read
music, will recognize the familiarity of the pattern on the page.
But unless one of the characters in the book has a definite reason
for putting the notes on paper, this is an unsatisfactory solution.
Music, like perfume, can be characterized either by its qualities —
its tempo, its pitch, its key, its mood — or by the effect it has on
the character hearing it.

In either case, of course, if the clue is not to be elusive in itself,
a definite label can be attached. The perfume is recognized as
Chanel Number 5, or the tune is an old French folk song.

Something more may be deduced from such clues, however.
Perfume is a personal thing; the same woman does not wear light,
flower-bouquet scents, and perfumes heavy with chypre or musk.
A man with a basso profundo cannot convincingly sing an air
written for a soprano — in the proper key, that is.

So too with the clues depending on taste and touch. The actual
qualities may be described— salty, sweet, bitter, sour, burnt; or
rough, smooth, silky, uneven, bristly — or the reaction to taste and
touch may be given.

If the tangible clue is to be used as a factor of mystification

§66

Marie F. Rodell

in itself — if it is to be a clue whose function is not immediately
apparent — great care must be given the description of it. A bit
of metal, a splinter of wood, a scrap of cloth, a sliver of glass or
a fragment of stone must be accurately described to the reader,
as the detective sees and feels it; its color, shape, weight, condi-
tion of wear and, when possible, the way in which it has become
a fragment — ^by breaking, by cutting, by burning, by tearing, etc.
If the detective does not know what the function of the scrap
may be, the reader then has as great an opportunity to deduce
it for himself as has the detective. It goes without saying, how-
ever, that no important clue of this nature must have a function
so obscure or unusual that the average reader knows little more
about it after it is explained than before. If the function of the
scrap is unusual, then ample provision must be made for a descrip-
tion of that function under some other guise, so that the reader
may spot it.

Thus, if the sliver of glass is from a shattered light bulb, if the
bit of metal is the tip of a carving knife, if the splinter of wood
comes from an umbrella shaft, and the fragment of stone from a
statuette, the reader may be expected to have sufficient knowledge
to deduce the function of the scrap for himself. But if the metal
is the screw from a highly technical machine, the reader cannot
be expected to recognize it — unless the machine is elsewhere in
the book described to the reader. In the same way, if the music
clue had been presented in notes, and its significance lay in the
fact that it came from a Mozart sonata, the average reader would
not be able to deduce the significant factor for himself.

The clues which the murderer leaves behind him in the nature
of fingerprints, footprints, blood stains, sweat or saliva stains, in-
dications of height or weight, bits of hair or skin or nail, are, on
the contrary, clues whose significance the reader cannot be ex-
pected to deduce for himself. Such clues are subject to analysis
and classification in the police laboratory, and it is the findings
which the technician makes, and which of course must be reported
to the reader, on which reader and detective will base their con-
clusion. The over-elaborate use of such clues is apt to turn the
mystery into a spectator sport; the ultra-scientific detective has
his reader at such a great disadvantage, that the reader can only

Clues 267

wonder and admire, without participating, for a large part of the
story.

All such tangible clues may be significant in still another way,
however. Their absence or their displacement may be more sig-
nificant than their character. The classic expression of this is, of
course, in the famous words of Sherlock Holmes:

'1 would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog
in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident.”

Thus, to transpose this into other terms, the lack of footprints
in an area of soft ground around the victim who had met his
death by stabbing would be as important a clue as footprints
would be, and much more baffiing. If the footprints were there,
they would be a clue to the identity of the murderer; if the foot-
prints were not there, they would be a clue to the method by
which the crime was committed, and therefore, by extension, to
the character of the murderer and his identity.

We have already spoken of the reversed clothing in The Chi-
nese Orange Mystery ^ which is an example of a clue by misplace-
ment or disarrangement. A commonplace object might become
a clue if it were out of place; a thimble in the breadbox or a loaf
of bread in the clothes basket might constitute a clue, not because
either thimble or bread had been used as an active means of
murder, but because their displacement indicated something out
of the ordinary.

Anything may serve as a clue which suits the purpose of the
author, provided, as we have said, that its description and func-
tion can be made plain to the reader. But certain clues have been
used so often and have grown so commonplace that the reader
will greet them with a groan. The cigarette butt and handker-
chief are the two prime offenders here. But if a new and fresh
way can be found of treating them, they are still permissible.
Lawrence G. Blochman has shown, for instance, in See You At
The Morgue j how the trite handkerchief can be given a new func-
tion. It is neither the ownership of the handkerchief nor finger-
prints on it which constitute the decisive nature of the clue, but
the traces of sweat from the murderer’s hands, Mr. Blochman,

268

Marie F. Rodell

keeping abreast of the times, used here one of the newer discov-
eries of the scientific laboratory: that sweat and saliva follow the
same groupings as blood. It is by an analysis of the sweat on the
handkerchief, and not by the handkerchief itself, that the criminal
is caught.

The bizarre clue, the exact opposite of the trite clue, is a po-
tential source of delight and bafflement to the reader, but it must
be handled with care. Erie Stanley Gardner is perhaps the great-
est master of this technique; he has used even so apparently un-
promising a thing as the length of a canary’s claws {The Case Of
The Lame Canary)] but the neophyte along this path must be
careful to follow Mr. Gardner’s footsteps not only in the oddness
of his clues, but also in the careful logic which explains them and
gives them a function in the solution as important as their oddness
warrants.

If such bizarre clues come to an author easily, he should by all
means use them, and should capitalize on their oddity by making
them extremely important to the course of the story. A truly bi-
zarre and baffling clue used only incidentally in a story is waste-
ful both of material and effect. But the author whose mind does
not run to this sort of thing should not spend his time straining
after it; the bizarre clue is one potential element of originality
and mystification, but it is far from being the only one; and time
and effort spent seeking it had better be applied to more basic
elements of the story.

The intangible clues become more and more important in mys-
tery fiction as murderers realize that fingerprints are dangerous
and that science can unravel the secrets of even the most unpromis-
ing physical clues. Moreover, from the writer’s point of view, the
tangible clue grows less and less effective as science progresses, for
if the laboratory unaided can deduce from a man’s pockets where
he has lived and what work he has done, too little is left to exer-
cise the deductive capacities of both fictional detective and reader.

Consequently, the intangible or character clue gains in impor-
tance. Such clues may be divided roughly into two classifications:
those revealing basic character traits, and those having to do with
behavior patterns.

Clues to the basic character traits are clues to motive — to the

Clues

S69

temperamental likelihood or tendency to kill, and to the specific
motive involved in the killing. Thus, a detective observing a man
kick a dog, slap a child and beat his wife, may deduce that the
man has definite sadistic tendencies, and that murder might well
be possible to him; while a character who faints at the sight of
blood is not apt to have bashed in grandma’s head with a blunt
instrument. These clues lead from suspect to crime, while the
tangible clues lead in general from crime to suspect (though a
bloodstain on the coat of a suspect would certainly be a physical
clue leading from suspect to crime).

Such broad general traits as sadism or squeamishness do not
present any very subtle problem either to detective or author.
But the character clues which indicate the suspect’s probable at-
titude toward the victim can be more complex. A man who is
jealous of his wife will be more apt to kill her lover than a man
indifferent to his wife’s behavior; a man who tries to arrange other
people’s lives for them is more likely to kill out of a rationalized
conviction that he is doing good, than one who minds his own
business. It is from the actions and words of such suspects, and
their behavior toward other characters in the story, that the de-
tective and the reader deduce the probability of motive in the
suspect.

The behavior pattern clues can be fun to work with, but they
are tricky to present convincingly to a reader. Not so long ago,
the New York police included with their description of a man
wanted for bank robbery two facts: that he habitually tilted his
hat to the right (he preferred his left profile) and that in mo-
ments of abstraction, he always took the coins from his pocket and
jingled them in his hands. Careful observation of the criminal
had shown the police that the man was unable to stop either of
these habits, although he knew that he had them. He could not
always remember to put his hat on straight, nor to leave the coins
in his pocket alone.

Such behavior patterns are difficult to present in mystery fiction,
for they put the author in danger of giving the reader a sense of
let-down. The reader expects that the criminal will commit as
nearly perfect a crime* as possible, and that his behavior there-
after will be always purposefully and alertly on guard against ob-

Marie F, Rodell

270

servation. If the criminal is caught in the end because he forgets
at some moment to be alert, praise for the solution of the mystery
cannot fairly go to detective or reader: the solution has depended
on a weakness of the murderer’s, not on a talent of the detective’s.

But such clues can be used to advantage. In the non-formula
mystery, particularly the mystery written from the murderer’s
point of view, such an unconscious behavior pattern can be a very
efiEective means of suspense; reader and murderer struggle through
the book to subdue the habit, but a sense of doom hangs over
the eflEort: sooner or later habit will reassert itself.

The effective use of such clues in the regular mystery will de-
pend on their absence or the substitutes for them which the mur-
derer provides. He knows that he must stop tilting his hat to the
right; that means that every time he puts it on, he must stop and
think for an infinitesimal second — and the reader and the detec-
tice can note that hesitation. Or perhaps he will make doubly
sure and go without a hat altogether, though the weather and
the occasion demand it. The absence of hat, in that case, might
be significant. He is too long accustomed to doing something in-
consequential with his hands when he is thinking to be able to
hold them still; perhaps he substitutes fiddling with a watch-
chain. Perhaps he is careful always to put his coins in a coin
purse, so they will not be available if his fingers go after them un-
consciously; in this case, his hands will go automatically to his
pockets before he can remember. Perhaps, more elaborately, he
invents a little trap for himself; puts a pin just inside the pocket,
which will prick his hand and remind him the habit is dangerous.
If the detective observes him prick his finger in such fashion once,
he may think nothing of it; but if he sees him do it two or three
times, he may wonder why the man does not simply remove the
pin.

A great variety of such behavior patterns are available for use
by the mystery author, and present a field for novelty which has
been little explored. The woman who always gets her lipstick on
her teeth might be forced to go without to stop the habit; the
man who habitually pulls on the lobe of his ear might have to
invent an apparently plausible and temporary reason for it — sl
shaving cut which requires a bandage, which he may logically

Clues

271

touch from time to time, to see if it is in place, and which will
remind him not to pull on the ear. The man who always twirls
his mustache will shave it off, but he will probably find himself
plucking at his upper lip. There are as many variations possible
as there are habits.

But the writer’s chief problem with clues is apt to be less their
nature than the manner of their presentation. If a clue leads di-
rectly and unequivocally to the suspect, there is no room left for
mystification.

We have already included in this chapter two ways of conceal-
ing the significance of a clue: concealing its function, or nature;
and distorting or misplacing it. But these are devices of the mur-
derer’s, not of the author’s.

The author’s devices for concealing the significance of a clue
are three. He may use the old conjuring technique, and immedi-
ately after presentation of the clue introduce a bit of action so
exciting and important that the reader forgets all about the casual
mention of the clue that went just before. The author is, in other
words, distracting the reader’s attention at the important moment,
as the pretty girl on the other side of the stage distracts the audi-
ence’s attention from the magician’s hands.

Secondly, the author may bury the clue among a number of
equally casual things which have no great significance. The in-
ventories of the victim’s pockets often hide clues in this fashion:
something in a pocket which belongs in a pocket, with the change
purse and handkerchief and wallet and keys, is actually significant
where these are not. This specific example of hiding is not a very
good one, because it has been used too often; readers are accus-
tomed to scanning the inventory with an eagle eye for the signifi-
cant clue. The same is true of the contents of a purse which spills
open accidentally, or of the bottles and jars in a medicine chest,
or the papers in a desk. Just the description of a room may do it:
among the couches, chairs, tables, bric-a-brac and pictures there
may be one small item of importance. Perhaps it is only a small
picture of a cat, and the inhabitant of the room has a phobia
against cats; perhaps it is a bit of dust under the bed, and the
inhabitant is a fanatic housekeeper.

This type of concealment is most effective if used in conjunc-

Marie F. Rodell

272

tion with the third method, which is concealing by timing. In this
method, the clue and its application are separated by fifty or a
hundred pages; put together, the two are significant, but if the
reader has forgotten the first one, the second one will mean noth-
ing to him. Thus, in the example given above, if the bit of dust
is observed on page five, and the character’s passion for cleanliness
is shown on pages forty and seventy, what has gone between may
make the reader forget that there ever was a bit of dust. Carter
Dickson has used this method brilliantly in The White Priory
Murders with the murder weapon itself.

The Locked-Room Lecture
By John Dickson Carr

The ''locked-room** puzzle is at once the most fascinating and dif-
ficult of detective story themes. Its greatest exponent^ indisputably
of the present day^ possibly of all time, is John Dickson Carr, the
brilliant American-born English writer who also signs himself as
Carter Dickson. His famous ''locked-room lecture/' delivered by
harrumphing Dr, Gideon Fell in the novel known in England as
The Hollow Man (London: Hamilton, 19 jj) and in the United
States as The Three Coffins (New York: Harper, 1935), still stands
as the classic exposition of the subject in all its aspects. The chap-
ter which includes the lecture is reproduced here in full, exactly
as it appeared in the book. If it moves the reader to hunt out a
copy of the original novel for reading or re-reading — what's wrong
with that?

9 0 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 qjuuUUULP 0 Q P i? 0 0 0 0 0 SI j) 0 0 0 Q 0 j) 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 o_ 0 Q (t

The coffee was on the table, the wine-bottles were empty, cigars
lighted. Hadley, Pettis, Rampole, and Dr. Fell sat round the glow
of a red-shaded table lamp in the vast, dusky dining-room at Pet-
tis’s hotel. They had stayed on beyond most, and only a few peo-
ple remained at other tables in that lazy, replete hour of a winter
afternoon when the fire is most comfortable and snowflakes begin
to sift past the windows. Under the dark gleam of armour and
armorial bearings. Dr. Fell looked more than ever like a feudal
baron. He glanced with contempt at the demi-tasse, which he
seemed in danger of swallowing cup and all. He made an expan-
sive, settling gesture with his cigar. He cleared his throat,

'1 will now lecture,” announced the doctor, with amiable firm-
ness, *'on the general mechanics and development of that situa-

273

274 John Dickson Carr

tion which is known in detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed
chamber/ ”

Hadley groaned. “Some other time/’ he suggested. “We don’t
want to hear any lecture after this excellent lunch, and especially
when there’s work to be done. Now, as I was saying a moment
ago — ”

“I will now lecture,” said Dr, Fell, inexorably, “on the general
mechanics and development of the situation which is known in
detective fiction as the ‘hermetically sealed chamber.’ Harrumph.
All those opposing can skip this chapter. Harrumph. To begin
with, gentlemen! Having been improving my mind with sensa-
tional fiction for the last forty years, I can say — ”

“But, if you’re going to analyze impossible situations,” inter-
rupted Pettis, “why discuss detective fiction?”

“Because,” said the doctor, frankly, “we’re in a detective story,
and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not
invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories.
Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters
in a book.

“But to continue: In discussing ’em, gentlemen, I am not going
to start an argument by attempting to lay down rules. I mean to
speak solely of personal tastes and preferences. We can tamper
with Kipling thus: ‘There are nine and sixty ways to construct a
murder maze, and every single one of them is right.’ Now, if I
said that to me every single one of them was equally interesting,
then I should be — to put the matter as civilly as possible — a cock-
eyed liar. But that is not the point. When I say that a story about
a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything
else in detective fiction, that’s merely a prejudice. I like my mur-
ders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of
colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot
find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as
though it might really have happened. All these things, I admit,
are happy, cheerful, rational prejudices, and entail no criticism
of more tepid (or more able) work.

“But this point must be made, because a few people who do
not like the slightly lurid insist on treating their preferences as
rules. They use, as a stamp of condemnation, the word ‘improba-

The Locked-Room Lecture 275

ble/ And thereby they gull the unwary into their own belief that
Improbable* simply means ‘bad.*

“Now, it seems reasonable to point out that the word improba-
ble is the very last which should ever be used to curse detective
fiction in any case, A great part of our liking for detective fiction
is based on a liking for improbability. When A is murdered, and
B and C are under strong suspicion, it is improbable that the
innocent-looking D can be guilty. But he is. If G has a perfect
alibi, sworn to at every point by every other letter in the alphabet,
it is improbable that G can have committed the crime. But he
has. When the detective picks up a fleck of coal dust at the sea-
shore, it is improbable that such an insignificant thing can have
any importance. But it will. In short, you come to a point where
the word improbable grows meaningless as a jeer. There can be
no such thing as any probability until the end of the story. And
then, if you wish the murder to be fastened on an unlikely per-
son (as some of us old fogies do), you can hardly complain because
he acted from motives less likely or necessarily less apparent than
those of the person first suspected.

“When the cry of ‘This-sort-of-thing-wouldn’t-happenl’ goes up,
when you complain about half-faced fiends and hooded phantoms
and blond hypnotic sirens, you are merely saying, ‘I don*t like
this sort of story.* That*s fair enough. If you do not like it, you
are howlingly right to say so. But when you twist this matter of
taste into a rule for judging the merit or even the probability of
the story, you are merely saying, ‘This series of events couldn’t
happen, because I shouldn’t enjoy it if it did.’

“What would seem to be the truth of the matter? We might test
it out by taking the hermetically sealed chamber as an example,
because this situation has been under a hotter fire than any other
on the grounds of being unconvincing.

“Most people, I am delighted to say, are fond of the locked
room. But — there’s the damned rub — even its friends are often
dubious. I cheerfully admit that I frequently am. So, for the mo-
ment, we’ll all side together on this score and see what we can dis-
cover. Why are we dubious when we hear the explanation of the
locked room? Not in the least because we are incredulous, but
simply because in some vague way we are disappointed. And from

276 John Dickson Carr

that feeling it is only natural to take an unfair step farther, and
call the whole business incredible or impossible or flatly ridicu-
lous.

“Precisely, in short,” boomed Dr. Fell, pointing his cigar, “what
O’Rourke was telling us today about illusions that are performed
in real life. Lord! gents, what chance has a story got when we
even jeer at real occurrences? The very fact that they do happen,
and that the illusionist gets away with it, seems to make the de-
ception worse. When it occurs in a detective story, we call it in-
credible. When it happens in real life, and we are forced to credit
it, we merely call the explanation disappointing. And the secret
of both disappointments is the same — 'wt expect too much.

“You see, the effect is so magical that we somehow expect the
cause to be magical also. When we see that it isn’t wizardry, we
call it tomfoolery. Which is hardly fair play. The last thing we
should complain about with regard to the murderer is his erratic
conduct. The whole test is, can the thing be done? If so, the ques-
tion of whether it would be done does not enter into it. A man
escapes from a locked room — ^well? Since apparently he has vio-
lated the laws of nature for our entertainment, then heaven knows
he is entitled to violate the laws of Probable Behaviour! If a man
offers to stand on his head, we can hardly make the stipulation
that he must keep his feet on the ground while he does it. Bear
that in mind, gents, when you judge. Call the result uninterest-
ing, if you like, or anything else that is a matter of personal taste.
But be very careful about making the nonsensical statement that
it is improbable or far fetched.”

“All right, all right,” said Hadley, shifting in his chair. “I don’t
feel very strongly on the matter myself. But if you insist on lectur-
ing — apparently with some application to this case — ?”

“Yes.”

“Then why take the hermetically sealed room? You yourself
said that Grimaud’s murder wasn’t our biggest problem. The
main puzzle is the business of a man shot in the middle of an
empty street. ...”

“Oh, that?” said Dr. Fell, with such a contemptuous wave of
his hand that Hadley stared at him. “That part of it? I knew the
explanation of that as soon as I heard the church bells. — ^Tut, tut.

The Locked-Room Lecture

such language! I*m quite serious. It's the escape from the room
that bothers me. And, to see if we can’t get a lead, I am going to
outline roughly some of the various means of committing mur-
ders in locked rooms, under separate classifications. This crime
belongs under one of them. It’s got to! No matter how wide the
variation may be, it’s only a variation of a few central methods.

“H’mfl Ha! Now, here is your box with one door, one window,
and solid walls. In discussing ways of escaping when both door
and window are sealed, I shall not mention the low (and nowa-
days very rare) trick of having a secret passage to a locked room.
This so puts a story beyond the pale that a self-respecting author
scarcely needs even to mention that there is no such thing. We
don’t need to discuss minor variations of this outrage: the panel
which is only large enough to admit a hand; or the plugged hole
in the ceiling through which a knife is dropped, the plug replaced
undetectably, and the floor of the attic above sprayed with dust
so that no one seems to have walked there. This is only the same
foul in miniature. The principle remains the same whether the
secret opening is as small as a thimble or as big as a barn door.
. . . As to legitimate classification, you might jot some of these
down, Mr. Pettis. ...”

“Right,” said Pettis, who was grinning. “Go on.”

“First! There is the crime committed in a hermetically sealed
room which really is hermetically sealed, and from which no mur-
derer has escaped because no murderer was actually in the room.
Explanations:

*‘i. It is not murder, but a series of coincidences ending in an acci-
dent which looks like murder. At an earlier time, before the
room was locked, there has been a robbery, an attack, a wound,
or a breaking of furniture which suggests a murder struggle.
Later the victim is either accidentally killed or stunned in a
locked room, and all these incidents are assumed to have taken
place at the same time. In this case the means of death is usu-
ally a crack on the head — ^presumably by a bludgeon, but really
from some piece of furniture. It may be from the corner of a
table or the sharp edge of a chair, but the most popular object
is an iron fender. The murderous fender, by the way, has been
killing people in a way that looks like murder ever since Sher-

278 John Dickson Carr

lock Holmes* adventure with the Crooked Man. The most thor-
oughly satisfying solution of this type of plot, which includes a
murderer, is in Gaston Leroux*s The Mystery of the Yellow
Room — the best detective tale ever written.

“2. It is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash
into an accidental death. This may be the effect of a haunted
room, by suggestion, or more usually by a gas introduced from
outside the room. This gas or poison makes the victim go ber-
serk, smash up the room as though there had been a struggle,
and die of a knife-slash inflicted on himself. In other variations
he drives the spike of the chandelier through his head, is hanged
on a loop of wire, or even strangles himself with his own hands.

**3. It is murder, by a mechanical device already planted in the
room, and hidden undetectably in some innocent-looking piece
of furniture. It may be a trap set by somebody long dead, and
work either automatically or be set anew by the modern killer.

It may be some fresh quirk of devilry from present-day science.
We have, for instance, the gun-mechanism concealed in the
telephone receiver, which fires a bullet into the victim*s head as
he lifts the receiver. We have the pistol with a string to the
trigger, which is pulled by the expansion of water as it freezes.
We have the clock that fires a bullet when you wind it; and
(clocks being popular) we have the ingenious grandfather clock
which sets ringing a hideously clanging bell on its top, so that
when you reach up to shut off the din your own touch releases
a blade that slashes open your stomach. We have the weight
that swings down from the ceiling, and the weight that crashes
out on your skull from the high back of a chair. There is the
bed that exhales a deadly gas when your body warms it, the
poisoned needle that leaves no trace, the —

“You see/’ said Dr. Fell, stabbing out with his cigar at each
point, “when we become involved with these mechanical devices
we are rather in the sphere of the general ‘impossible situation’
than the narrower one of the locked room. It would be possible
to go on forever, even on mechanical devices for electrocuting
people. A cord in front of a row of pictures is electrified. A chess-
board is electrified. Even a glove is electrified. There is death in
every article of furniture, including a tea-um. But these things
seem to have no present application, so we go on to:

The Locked-Room Lecture 279

“4. It is suicide, which is intended to look like murder. A man stabs
himself with an icicle; the icicle melts; and, no weapon being
found in the locked room, murder is presumed. A man shoots
himself with a gun fastened on the end of an elastic — the gun,
as he releases it, being carried up out of sight into the chimney.
Variations of this trick (not locked-room affairs) have been the
pistol with a string attached to a weight, which is whisked over
a parapet of a bridge into the water after the shot; and, in the
same style, the pistol jerked out of a window into a snowdrift,

**5. It is a murder which derives its problem from illusion and im-
personation. Thus: the victim, still thought to be alive, is al-
ready lying murdered inside a room, of which the door is under
observation. The murderer, either dressed as his victim or mis-
taken from behind for the victim, hurries in at the door. He
whirls round, gets rid of his disguise, and instantly comes out of
the room as himself. The illusion is that he has merely passed
the other man in coming out. In any event, he has an alibi;
since, when the body is discovered later, the murder is pre-
sumed to have taken place some time after the impersonated
Victim* entered the room.

“6. It is a murder which, although committed by somebody outside
the room at the time, nevertheless seems to have been com-
mitted by somebody who must have been inside.

‘Tn explaining this,'* said Dr, Fell, breaking off, ‘1 will classify
this type of murder under the general name of the Long-Distance
or Icicle Crime, since it is usually a variation of that principle.
IVe spoken of icicles; you understand what I mean. The door is
locked, the window too small to admit a murderer; yet the victim
has apparently been stabbed from inside the room and the wea-
pon is missing. Well, the icicle has been fired as a bullet from
outside — 'wt will not discuss whether this is practical, any more
than we have discussed the mysterious gases previously mentioned
— and it melts without a trace. I believe Anna Katharine Green
was the first to use this trick in detective fiction, in a novel called
Initials Only,

'*(By the way, she was responsible for starting a number of tradi-
tions. In her first detective novel, over fifty years ago, she founded
the legend of the murderous secretary killing his employer, and
I think present-day statistics would prove that the secretary is

sSo John Dickson Carr

still the commonest murderer in fiction. Butlers have long gone
out of fashion; the invalid in the wheel-chair is too suspect; and
the placid middle-aged spinster has long ago given up homicidal
mania in order to become a detective. Doctors, too, are better be-
haved nowadays, unless, of course, they grow eminent and turn
into Mad Scientists. Lawyers, while they remain persistently
crooked, are only in some cases actively dangerous. But cycles re-
turn! Edgar Allan Poe, eighty years ago, blew the gaff by calling
his murderer Goodfellow; and the most popular modern mystery-
writer does precisely the same thing by calling his arch-villain
Goodman. Meanwhile, those secretaries are still the most danger-
ous people to have about the house.)

'*To continue with regard to the icicle: Its actual use has been
attributed to the Medici, and in one of the admirable Fleming
Stone stories an epigram of Martial is quoted to show that it had
its deadly origin in Rome in the first century a.d. Well, it has
been fired, thrown, or shot from a crossbow as in one adventure
of Hamilton Cleek (that magnificent character of the Forty Faces),
Variants of the same theme, a soluble missile, have been rock-
salt bullets and even bullets made of frozen blood.

‘‘But it illustrates what 1 mean in crimes committed inside a
room by somebody who was outside. There are other methods.
The victim may be stabbed by a thin swordstick blade, passed
between the twinings of a summer-house and withdrawn; or he
may be stabbed with a blade so thin that he does not know he is
hurt at all, and walks into another room before he suddenly col-
lapses in death. Or he is lured into looking out of a window in-
accessible from below; yet from above our old friend ice smashes
down on his head, leaving him with a smashed skull but no wea-
pon because the weapon has melted.

“Under this heading (although it might equally well go under
head number 3 ) we might list murders committed by means of
poisonous snakes or insects. Snakes can be concealed not only in
chests and safes, but also deftly hidden in flower-pots, books, chan-
deliers, and walking-sticks. I even remember one cheerful little
item in which the amber stem of a pipe, grotesquely carven as a
scorpion, comes to life a real scorpion as the victim is about to
put it into his mouth. But for the greatest long-range murder ever

The Locked’Room Lecture 281

committed in a locked room, gents, I commend you to one^of the
most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective
fiction. (In fact, it shares the honours for supreme untouchable
top-notch excellence with Thomas Burke’s, “The Hands of Mr.
Ottermole,” Chesterton’s, “The Man in the Passage,” and Jacques
Futrelle’s, “The Problem of Cell 13.”) This is Melville Davisson
Post’s, “The Doomdorf Mystery” — and the long-range assassin is the
sun. The sun strikes through the window of the locked room,
makes a burning-glass of a bottle of Doomdorf s own raw white
wood-alcohol liquor on the table, and ignites through it the per-
cussion cap of a gun hanging on the wall: so that the breast of
the hated one is blown open as he lies in his bed. Then, again,
we have . . .

“Steady! Harrumph. Ha. I’d better not meander; I’ll round oflE
this classification with the final heading:

**7. This is a murder depending on an effect exactly the reverse of
number 5. That is, the victim is presumed to be dead long be-
fore he actually is. The victim lies asleep (drugged but un-
harmed) in a locked room. Knockings on the door fail to rouse
him. The murderer starts a foul-play scare; forces the door;
gets in ahead and kills by stabbing or throat-cutting, while
suggesting to other watchers that they have seen something they
have not seen. The honour of inventing this device belongs to
Israel Zangwill, and it has since been used in many forms. It
has been done (usually by stabbing) on a ship, in a ruined
house, in a conservatory, in an attic, and even in the open air
— ^where the victim has first stumbled and stunned himself be-
fore the assassin bends over him. So — ”

“Steady! Wait a minute!” interposed Hadley, pounding on the
table for attention. Dr. Fell, the muscles of whose eloquence were
oiling up in a satisfactory way, turned agreeably and beamed on
him. Hadley went on: “This may be all very well. You’ve dealt
with all the locked-room situations — ”

“All of them?” snorted Dr. Fell, opening his eyes wide. “Of
course I haven’t. That doesn’t even deal comprehensively with the
methods under that particular classification; it’s only a rough off-
hand outline; but I’ll let it stand. I was going to speak of the other
classification: the various means of hocussing doors and windows

282 John Dickson Carr

so that they can be locked on the inside. H*mf! Hah! So, gentle-
men, I continue —

‘‘Not yet you don*t,’* said the superintendent, doggedly. “Fll
argue the thing on your own grounds. You say we can get a lead
from stating the various ways in which the stunt has been worked.
You’ve stated seven points; but, applied to this case, each one must
be ruled out according to your own classification-head. You head
the whole list, ‘No murderer escaped from the room because no
murderer was ever actually in it at the time of the crime.’ Out
goes everything! The one thing we definitely do know, unless
we presume Mills and Dumont to be liars, is that the murderer
really was in the room! What about that?”

Pettis was sitting forward, his bald head gleaming by the glow
of the red-shaded lamp as he bent over an envelope. He was
making neat notes with a neat gold pencil. Now he raised his
prominent eyes, which seemed more prominent and rather frog-
like as he studied Dr. Fell.

“Er — ^yes,” he said, with a short cough. “But that point number
5 is suggestive, I should think. Illusion! What if Mills and Mrs.
Dumont really didn’t see somebody go in that door; that they
were hoaxed somehow or that the whole thing was an illusion
like a magic-lantern?”

“Illusion me foot,” said Hadley. “Sorry! I thought of that,
too. I hammered Mills about it last night, and I had another
word or two with him this morning. Whatever else the murderer
was, he wasn’t an illusion and he did go in that door. He was
solid enough to cast a shadow and make the hall vibrate when he
walked. He was solid enough to talk and slam a door. You agree
with that. Fell?”

The doctor nodded disconsolately. He drew in absent puffs on
his dead cigar.

“Oh yes, I agree to that. He was solid enough, and he did go in.”

“And even,” Hadley pursued, while Pettis summoned the waiter
to get more coffee, “granting what we know is untrue. Even grant-
ing a magic-lantern shadow did all that, a magic-lantern shadow
didn’t kill Grimaud. It was a solid pistol in a solid hand. And
for the rest of the points. Lord knows Grimaud didn’t get shot
by a mechanical device. What’s more, he didn’t shoot himself —

The Locked-Room Lecture

283

and have the gun whisk up the chimney like the one in your ex-
ample. In the first place, a man can’t shoot himself from some
feet away. And in the second place, the gun can’t whisk up the
chimney and sail across the roofs to Cagliostro Street, shoot Fley,
and tumble down with its work finished. Blast it, Fell, my con-
versation is getting like yoursi It’s too much exposure to your
habits of thought. I’m expecting a call from the office any min-
ute, and I want to get back to sanity. What’s the matter with
you?”

Dr. Fell, his little eyes opened wide, was staring at the lamp,
and his fist came down slowly on the table.

“Chimney!” he said. “Chimney! Wow! I wonder if — ? Lord!
Hadley, what an ass I’ve been!”

“What about the chimney?” asked the superintendent. “We’ve
proved the murderer couldn’t have got out like that: getting up
the chimney.”

“Yes, of course; but I didn’t mean that. I begin to get a glim-
mer, even if it may be a glimmer of moonshine. I must have an-
other look at that chimney.”

Pettis chuckled, tapping the gold pencil on his notes. “Any-
how,” he suggested, “you may as well round out this discussion.
I agree with the superintendent about one thing. You might do
better to outline ways of tampering with doors, windows, or chim-
neys.”

“Chimneys, I regret to say,” Dr. Fell pursued, his gusto return-
ing as his abstraction left him, “chimneys, I regret to say, are not
favoured as a means of escape in detective fiction — except, of
course, for secret passages. There they are supreme. There is the
hollow chimney with the secret room behind; the back of the fire-
place opening like a curtain; the fireplace that swings out; even
the room under the hearthstone. Moreover, all kinds of things can
be dropped down chimneys, chiefly poisonous things. But the
murderer who makes his escape by climbing up is very rare. Be-
sides being next to impossible, it is a much grimier business than
monkeying with doors or windows. Of the two chief classifications,
doors and windows, the door is by far the more popular, and we
may list thus a few means of tampering with it so that it seems
to be locked on the inside:

2^4 John Dickson Carr

**i. Tampering with the key which is still in the lock. This was the
favourite old-fashioned method, but its variations are too well-
known nowadays for anybody to use it seriously. The stem of
the key can be gripped and turned with pliers from outside;
we did this ourselves to open the door of Grimaud's study. One
practical little mechanism consists of a thin metal bar about
two inches long, to which is attached a length of stout string.
Before leaving the room, this bar is thrust into the hole at the
head of the key, one end under and one end over, so that it
acts as a lever; the string is dropped down and run under the
door to the outside. The door is closed from outside. You have
only to pull on the string, and the lever turns the lock; you
then shake or pull out the loose bar by means of the string, and,
when it drops, draw it under the door to you. There are vari-
ous applications of this same principle, all entailing the use of
string.

'*2. Simply removing the hinges of the door without disturbing lock
or bolt. This is a neat trick, known to most schoolboys when
they want to burgle a locked cupboard; but of course the hinges
must be on the outside of the door.

“5. Tampering with the bolt. String again: this time with a mech-
anism of pins and darning-needles, by which the bolt is shot
from the outside by leverage of a pin stuck on the inside of the
door, and the string is worked through the keyhole. Philo Vance,
to whom my hat is lifted, has shown us this best application of
the stunt. There are simpler, but not so effective, variations us-
ing one piece of string. A 'tomfooF knot, which a sharp jerk will
straighten out, is looped in one end of a long piece of cord. This
loop is passed round the knob of the bolt, down, and under
the door. The door is then closed, and, by drawing the string
along to the left or right, the bolt is shot, A jerk releases the
knot from the knob, and the string drawn out. Ellery Queen
has shown us still another method, entailing the use of the dead
man himself — ^but a bald statement of this, taken out of its con-
text, would sound so wild as to be unfair to that brilliant gentle-
man.

'‘4. Tampering with a falling bar or latch. This usually consists in
propping something under the latch, which can be pulled away
after the door is closed from the outside, and let the bar drop.
The best method by far is by the use of the ever-helpfui ice, a
cube of which is propped under the latch; and, when it melts.

The Locked-Room Lecture 285

the latch falls. There is one case in which the mere slam of the
door sufiBces to drop the bar inside.

“5. An illusion, simple but effective. The murderer, after com-
mitting his crime, has locked the door from the outside and
kept the key. It is assumed, however, that the key is still in the
lock on the inside. The murderer, who is jfirst to raise a scare
and find the body, smashes the upper glass panel of the door,
puts his hand through with the key concealed in it, and 'finds’
the key in the lock inside, by which he opens the door. This
device has also been used with the breaking of a panel out of
an ordinary wooden door.

''There are miscellaneous methods, such as locking a door from
the outside and returning the key to the room by means of string
again, but you can see for yourselves that in this case none of
them can have any application. We found the door locked on the
inside. Well, there are many ways by which it could have been
done — but it was not done, because Mills was watching the door
the whole time. This room was only locked in a technical sense.
It was watched, and that shoots us all to blazes.**

"I don’t like to drag in famous platitudes,” said Pettis, his fore-
head wrinkled, "but it would seem pretty sound to say exclude
the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth. You*ve excluded the door; I presume you also ex-
clude the chimney?”

"I do,” grunted Dr. Fell.

"Then we come back in a circle to the window, don’t we?”
demanded Hadley. "You’ve gone on and on about ways that obvi-
ously couldn’t have been used. But in this catalogue of sensation-
alism you’ve omitted all mention of the only means of exit the
murderer could have used. . .

"Because it wasn’t a locked window, don’t you see?” cried Dr.
Fell. "I can tell you several brands of funny business with win-
dows if they’re only locked. It can be traced down from the earli-
est dummy nail-heads to the latest hocus-pocus with steel shut-
ters. You can smash a window, carefully turn its catch to lock
it, and then, when you leave, simply replace the whole pane with
a new pane of glass and putty it round; so that the new pane looks
like the original and the window is locked inside. But this win-

286 John Dickson Carr

dow wasn’t locked or even closed — it was only inaccessible.”

”I seem to have read somewhere of human flies . . Pettis
suggested.

Dr. Fell shook his head. “We won’t debate whether a human fly
can walk on a sheer smooth wall. Since I’ve cheerfully accepted so
much, I might believe that if the fly had any place to light. That
is, he would have to start from somewhere and end somewhere.
But he didn’t; not on the roof, not on the ground below. . .

Dr. Fell hammered his fists against his temples. “However, if you
want a suggestion or two in that respect, I will tell you — ”

He stopped, raising his head. At the end of the quiet, now de-
serted dining-room a line of windows showed pale light now flick-
ering with snow. A figure had darted in silhouette against them,
hesitating, peering from side to side, and then hurrying down
towards them. Hadley uttered a mufiled exclamation as they saw
it was Mangan. Mangan was pale.

“Not something else?” asked Hadley, as coolly as he could. He
pushed back his chair. “Not something else about coats changing
colour or — ”

“No,” said Mangan. He stood by the table, drawing his breath
in gasps. “But you’d better get over there. Something’s happened
to Drayman; apopleptic stroke or something like that. No, he’s
not dead or anything. But he’s in a bad way. He was trying to
get in touch with you when he had the stroke. ... He keeps
talking wildly about somebody in his room, and fireworks, and
chimneys.”

Command Performance
By Lee Wright

innnrs ooooooosoo o o o o o o d o o o o o o o o o

Lee Wright has been editor, since its inception, of Simon & Schus-
ter's ''Inner Sanctum Mystery'' department, an imprint that has
come increasingly to stand for catholicity of taste and healthy
iconoclasm in the mystery field. Her present article makes a typi-
cally original contribution to current thinking about the writing
and publishing of whodunits. Did you, reader, ever stop to think
that you are responsible for the kind of mysteries authors write
and publishers print?

iUO 0 0 0 0 0 0 0_Q Q 0 p Q 0 P 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 p_0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q 0 Cl OiUAiUUl

There is nothing revolutionary in the theory of supply and de-
mand. And yet it has not occurred to a number of mystery critics
— both amateur and professional — that supply and demand also
operate in the field of fictional homicide.

The kind of mysteries that are published at any given time
faithfully reflects the kind of mysteries most people want to read
at that time.

For the past ten years a great many wistful articles have been
written by lovers of the detective story, .deploring the non-essential
elements that have insinuated themselves into this art form. The
intrusion of Love, Humor, Politics, Sociology fills them with
loathing. Give us The Great Detective in his pure form, they
plead. Give us the Puzzle, the Clues, the Deductions, the Solu-
tion — ^unadorned. Give us, in other words, Sherlock Holmes.

They are living in the past, in an era when people lined up in
queues outside newsstands in gaslit London to get their new copy
of Strand Magazine, an era when the detective story was new and
young, as vigorous as any healthy baby. And as attractive. So
attractive, in fact, that it was the readers themselves who made

288 Lee Wright

Conan Doyle continue with his great detective even after he had
killed oflE Holmes in what can only be called a burst of unjustifi-
able savagery. He was forced to bring him back to life — a verita-
ble Lazarus.

But there came time for the infant to grow up — ^when for most
people this pure puzzle form of the mystery story was not quite
enough. Perhaps they began to be curious about how a great de-
tective would act when faced with such trivial, but horribly real,
crises as human beings who would not stay in appointed places,
trains that would not be caught on time, telephones that went out
of order, hansom cabs that would not wait conveniently on cor-
ners — in fact, all the monstrous calamities of real life.

In answer to this growing demand, which was inarticulate —
but eiflEective in bookstores — things began to happen. In England,
E. C. Bentley created a great detective and made him operate in
a setting that was a reasonable facsimile of life. Philip Trent
not only had an immediate success, but he has survived as a great
detective practically from this one outstanding performance in
Trent's Last Case. At any rate, he set the style for much that fol-
lowed in England, and a very fine style it was.

It is significant that the attitude of the readers in England, their
respect for this art form, their willingness not only to read these
books but to be seen reading them, influenced many fine English
writers to contribute to the literature. G. K. Chesterton gained
prestige when he created Father Brown. He had proved himself
a master at other literary forms, and he proved himself again a
master at this one. The English public has never wavered in its
admiration and respect for the mystery story, and, as a result, the
English product has maintained a consistently high standard. The
editors and publishers responsible, the writers themselves, react
instinctively to the audience they are supplying with books. They
do not have to apologize for Father Knox when he writes a mys-
tery story. They can bring the fact out as an added feather in his
cap.

In America the record has been a very different one, A certain
meretricious snobbishness early crept in to the mystery field. This
was probably inevitable in a society that was just beginning, de-
precatingly, to produce its own art forms, that sat endlessly and

Command Performance 289

willingly at the feet of lecturers purveying culture. Sinclair Lewis’
Babbitt might read a Penny Dreadful overnight on a train trip,
but he was taught not to keep a copy of it on his library table.

As a result of this artificial and phony culture, the mystery story
in America suffered a long and dreary eclipse. Since readers
thought of mystery stories as being sensational, unliterary, and
shabby, most of them became so. The supply, as usual, followed
the demand. Fine novelists didn’t dream of trying their hand at
such writing. And if they had, they would have insisted upon us-
ing pen names.

Fortunately, after too many decades, several things happened
that had an effect on American reading opinion. The first, and
probably the most powerful, was the news that Woodrow Wilson,
that incontestably high-minded and intellectual idealist, was not
only an avid reader of mystery stories, but also was perfectly will-
ing to admit it handsomely. Then, along came S. S. Van Dine,
whose books, through a combination of expert craftsmanship
from the writer and brilliant exploitation from the publisher, be-
came fashionable. One began to see a great many obviously re-
spectable and reasonably cultivated people openly carrying around
copies of Van Dine’s novels. This same era produced the first
books of Dashiell Hammett, who made the most profound impres-
sion on the mystery story technically (as had Bentley in England),
but Van Dine’s work certainly created much more of a social
splash.

At any rate, once again the demand created the supply. Almost
at once the literary quality of the mystery story in America went
up, and in the past ten years has reached an artistic and compe-
tent level.

At the same time a new and important influence on public opin-
ion was exercised through the medium of motion pictures. Alfred
Hitchcock was the first to prove that a Pearl White serial was not
necessarily the only way one could represent an exciting mystery
story on the screen. It is largely through his work, and the work
of other fine directors and producers who came after him, that
the mystery novel of suspense is today the most widely read of
all types of mystery fiction.

There are still, of course, the few diehards who want to keep

290 Lee Wright

the mystery story in its original, rigidly-restricted form. They
are like a great many other people who yearn for the good old
days economically and socially as well as literarily. The present
disappoints them, and the future appalls them, because they want
to live in the past.

And it is still true in America, of course, that mystery readers
are set apart — in a patronizing, though kindly way — from readers
of all other types of books, in the same way that one is indulgent
to the crossword puzzle fan or the ardent quiz-program listener.
This attitude — in other words, the demand — ^still operates very
powerfully in the creation and promotion of the supply. The
manner in which mystery stories are reviewed in magazines and
newspapers reflects the attitude. The manner in which mystery
stories are distributed — ^mostly by rentals instead of direct con-
sumer purchases — ^reflects this attitude. The too-great volume of
hastily written and automatically published mysteries reflects this
attitude. Recent polls indicate that although most readers are
now ready to admit that they enjoy mystery stories, they are not
yet ready to grant that such novels are '‘worthwhile,” appropriate
for addition to a library — in other words, not to be purchased at
prices equal to those of other novels.

Obviously, these are all obstacles in the path of the successful
sale of any mystery story no matter what its literary quality. More
and more, publishers get around the obstacle instead of trying to
jump over it, by entirely artificial means. By omitting the cate-
gory "mystery” from the jacket of the book itself and from their
advertising, by charging for it more than they charge for a mystery,
they have managed to make best-sellers out of a number of mys-
tery novels. The classic example, of course, is Rebecca by Daphne
DuMaurier. This is a mystery novel, well-written, with a super-
structure of characterization, romance, and emotional overtones,
which do not make it any less a mystery story. Interesting to spec-
ulate its fate had it been published as one.

However, it is an encouraging sign that these books should be
so successful no matter how published. The methods are artificial,
but the result proves that the demand is there and that more and
more readers want and respect this kind of story. That demand
wiE grow and eventually will sweep away the artificial devices;

Command Performance 291

When that day comes — ^when the mystery story is accepted as a
completely responsible member of the fiction family — instead of
the attractive, but irresponsible, stepchild it now is — ^when that
happens, the demand for the best will create the appropriate sup-
ply. Then, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway
will occasionally turn their talents to the mystery story. It is even
possible that they will write one as good as the classic few that
have enriched our literature since Edgar Allan Poe first solved
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue/'

Mystery Midwife: The Crime Editor’s Job
By Isabelle Taylor

?nnro oooooooooooooOoooooooooooooooooooooboooooooooooo'

As editor of Doubleday & Company's ''Crime Club/' Mrs- Taylor
is responsible for the largest mystery output under one imprint
in the United States: forty-eight nexo crimes a year, (The denomi-
nator is four books per month, not one for each state of the Un-
ion,) Her fully documented article describing the trials, joys, and
multiple responsibilities of the mystery editor's job will come as
a revelation to those readers who conceive of that individual's
function as limited to reading and accepting "masterpieces,"

JULOJLAiUUliUJ 0 0 .0 P 0 0 0 q Q 0 0 0 0 P 0 (t 0 0 Q 0 p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ft 0 0 0 Q A 0 0 0 0 0 0 a

As THE scope of the mystery story has widened, the job of an edi-
tor who publishes mysteries has become more involved and much
more complex. In the days when detective stories followed the
Sherlock Holmes pattern exclusively, an editor checked for cor-
rect plot resohrtion and proper Scotland Yard procedure in the
investigation of crime. Now it is a very different task, and an in-
creasingly fascinating one. An editor must be a combination of
foster-mother, father-confessor, and accoucheur — ^which is a neat
trick if you can do it!

I remember the season when almost every author wrote asking
if he shouldn’t do a spy story. Obviously a writer who combines
humor with homicide would be ill-advised to branch into a field
with which he was not familiar; the same thing was true of peo-
ple who handled the family-conflict stories. A reputation made by
several excellent books based on the psychological study of mur-
der would fall flat on its face if a creaky who-stole-the-formula
yarn issued from the same pen. So — the answer to most of these
queri^ was “No.” A year or two later several writers turned out
very good yarns, in their accustomed style, but working in the

Mystery Midwife: The Crime Editor's Job 293

sabotage at home, and the enemy within our gates, theme. It was
a matter of adjusting individual styles to current themes and pub-
lic interest.

Once a manuscript is in, and the decision has been made to
publish it, an editor goes to work on checking every detail for ac-
curacy, credibility, and taste. And here is where a large reference
library, a good memory, and a ‘"feel” for the market is necessary.
Some beautiful howlers undoubtedly get by even the most careful
copy-reader, but an endeavor is made to avoid them. We heard
from several irate fans when a young girl was permitted to visit
her fianc^ in the .death-house, wearing a blue wool dress when
she entered, and a green silk when she left fifteen minutes later.
Relationships, ages, time factors, and details of geography are com-
paratively easy to bring into line. But police procedure, legalities
governing wills, divorces, admission of evidence, types of punish-
ment vary in all the forty-eight states. Sometimes I sigh for the
simplicity of Scotland Yard. Then I wouldn't have to remember
that there is no capital punishment in Michigan, that California
executes by the gas-chamber, Maryland by hanging, and New
York by the electric chair. You can’t wait for the coroner to view
the body in New York, because there is no such person, he’s a
medical examiner, and there are some states where a doctor or a
butcher are excluded from jury duty. In the case of a writer pro-
ducing a first mystery story, a wise editor will inquire how care-
fully he has checked on the police and legal procedure for the lo-
cality where the story is laid.

There is also the question of libel, and good taste. A victim
may be bashed over the head with a bottle of a nationally-
advertised soft drink, but he can’t be poisoned by drinking from
that bottle because a lethal dose has been previously introduced
into the liquid — ^not when the advertisements make much of the
fact that you are served the drink untouched by human hands from
the time it leaves the factory until it is opened in your presence.
Jokes may be made about public figures, but when they verge on
the too-personal the public verdict is “we are not amused.”

Characters in a mystery story do not operate in a vacuum, and
the editor must have a weather eye out to catch errors or omis-
sions in the background fill-in. During the war, long drives in an

294 Isabelle Taylor

automobile, huge family dinners with a couple of sides of beef,
and an unaccounted-for number of young civilian men, had to
be gently but firmly removed. If a story is definitely placed in
a certain year, in a certain locality, every effort must be made to
create verisimilitude in details, because the plot itself is usually
enough of a strain on one’s imagination. In fairness to mystery
writers one has to admit that they are much more careful with
these details than a great many novelists. Perhaps the training in
plot construction has made them methodical about sweeping up
or lopping off the various bits and pieces of window dressing that
don’t belong.

The title of a mystery is something to be considered gravely,
almost with prayer. Some titles are naturals, the book couldn’t be
called anything else. Others are the best of a bad bargain, and
represent a compromise in the author’s mind between what he
would like, and what would be a grand title but have no connec-
tion with the story. Occasionally a manuscript will have a very apt
title, and be well along toward appearance on the bookstalls, but
the editor opens Publishers' Weekly and sees another mystery
with the exact same title announced for publication next week!
So there is a hasty re-titling that must be caught all along the
line — ^jacket, title-page, running-heads, advertisements, catalogue,
etc. A title should be fitted to the type of book it labels. A pun-
ning, or wisecracking title, doesn’t belong on a straightforward
story. It’s wasted, and may attract readers who will feel sold down
the river when they don’t get what they want and expect. You as
a reader may not be aware of how you react to titles, but watch
yourself the next time you select a story from a long shelf of
mysteries. The one that strikes you as offering the type of enter-
tainment you want may represent agonized hours on the part of
the author and the editor to make it sound just right. The war
added the necessity for extra care, in order to avoid anything that
might give the impression that the book was a non-fiction war
report.

From titles the next step is jackets. Here again, the style of the
jacket should carry on the general style of the story. A hard-boiled
number gets nowhere when plastered with an illustrative draw-
ing of a sweet old lady peering down a dark stairwell, although

Mystery Midwife: The Crime Editor's Job 295

such a scene may be lifted from the yam itself. A leisurely Eng-
lish novel of detection and deduction is badly advertised by a
modernistic design poster jacket. It is eminently desirable to have
the artist who is doing the jacket read the manuscript before he
starts to work. Then one gets a true marriage of mood and pace
between the novel and the wrapper. When an author writes to
me, after receiving bound copies of his book, to say that the
jacket is perfect and please thank the art department for it, I
am content. Then I know a reader who has selected the book be-
cause the jacket appealed to him will be satisfied and entertained.

A mystery story to the author who has just finished it and sent
it off to his publisher is naturally a favored and indulged only
child. (If its own creator doesn’t so regard it, it isn’t very well
prepared to meet the wide, wide world.) But to the editor who
receives it, it is a very welcome member of a family, each of
whom must be cared for, dressed in its best, and presented at the
proper time and in the proper company to make the best impres-
sion. Scheduling a large list of mysteries can resemble a jig-saw
puzzle, put and take, and a juggling act all at the same time.

When several mysteries appear in the same month (my own
schedule calls for four) one must be careful to provide for a wide
range of tastes. Consequently a fast-moving fairly tough story is
put on the same date with what Will Guppy calls a “soft-boiled”
one. Two chess puzzles together would be bad business, so we
pair each one of these with a spy-adventure type, or a modern
Robin Hood yarn. It would not be fair to authors producing first
books to line three of them up in one month, so we salt them
through a list into spots where the fact that they are new is an
added attraction, not a wholesale green entry feature. Four Eng-
lish stories a month wouldn’t be any smarter than four Hollywood
settings, and sameness in the house-party, snowbound hunting
lodge, or marooned sailing party frame is to be avoided.

Publishing mysteries has, I believe, fewer occupational hazards
than other forms of presenting printed matter to the public. Au-
thors who turn out the murder or adventure book are less tem-
peramental, more professional about meeting deadlines and ac-
cepting editorial suggestions than writers who fancy themselves as
producers of “literature.” Most whodunit-ers know and accept

296 Isabelle Taylor

certain commercial truths, even though they don’t like them any
more than the publisher does. For instance, a mystery story has
only four to six months active life, unless it is a world-beater,
or unique in its content or topical appeal. The percentage of pub-
lished mysteries sold to lending libraries runs, by various esti-
mates, from seventy-five to ninety. This means that for every copy
sold to the lending library the author gets one royalty (and the
publisher sells one copy), and the readers may run as high as
forty or fifty on that one copy. A mystery which is being widely
discussed and merits excellent reviews sells to only a fraction of
the market it reaches. This isn’t fair to anybody concerned but
to date there has been no workable answer to the problem.

Few mystery writers are personally vain; they know that pub-
licity about their habits, their taste in cereal, and even their love
lives has no effect on the readers of their books, and that the
only angle on their own background that carries any weight is
whether or not they know what they are talking about when they
write. A person familiar with life in a small college town can im-
bue a story with the gentle malice, the bull sessions, and the fac-
ulty intrigue that abound in such a setting, and nobody gives a
damn whether she’s married to an English professor or got straight
A’s when she graduated at fifteen. Ownership of a sailboat by an
author is only important when a story concerns sailing and the
writer obviously knows his jib from his galley.

There is more co-operation and less competition between mys-
tery story writers than is the case with most creative artists. Per-
haps this is occasioned by the fact that enormous success in one
publishing season by a mystery doesn’t at all decrease the popu-
larity of the other good books published at the same time. Book-
sellers may speak of *‘this year’s big historical novel” or ”the lead-
ing non-fiction title on such-and-such a phase of international
relations” but everybody in the game knows thkt there is always
room for any number of good mysteries. The sale of each one
should, and usually does, help the sale of the others.

In addition to what is called the ‘‘trade sale” of a book, mean-
ing those copies which are sold to dealers and booksellers for re-
sale at the full retail price, there are other channels of distribu-
tion which the editor must explore for his foster-children. Second

Mystery Midwife: The Crime Editor^ s Job 297

serial is the term applied to publication of the book in newspapers
or magazines after book publication. Not all mysteries lend them-
selves to this use because they may be too long to cut properly for
condensed versions, they may be strong meat for a family news-
paper, or the general subject matter may be considered by a maga-
zine as too dated.

There are book clubs specializing in the mystery and detective
story. These usually offer three or four full-length books in one
volume a few months after original publication. The major book
clubs have been known to use super-duper mystery tales for their
monthly selection. Each club has its own preferences and taboos,
with which the editor should be familiar. Stories with a fairly
lurid sex tangle obviously can't be submitted to a club which has
a large circulation for family use, and the ultra-literate tour de
force wouldn’t get far in a club that does most of its advertising
in the tabloids.

The twenty-five cent paperbound books have made available
to readers a vast number of excellent books at a popular price,
and on the other side of the picture they have opened up a new
and potentially large source of revenue to the writers of mysteries.
Because the original trade life of a mystery is short, this new field
of distribution may go far toward equalizing the profits derived
from a well-constructed, carefully thought-out story for which, up
to recent years, the author did not usually receive adequate com-
pensation. It is quite true that a second rate story isn’t going to
go into a cheap reprint, but the first class stories will, so that
large numbers of new readers will become familiar with authors’
names, and enlarge the market for new books by their favorites.

As an editor of mystery stories, my profound hope is that writ-
ers have as much fun writing them as I have editing them. Then
everybody in this game of whodunit will be satisfied.

Hollywoodunit
By Richard Mealand

Mr. Mealand^ for many years story editor of Paramount Pictures^
and a former magazine fiction editor^ is currently the conductor of
a department, *'Books Into Pictures/' in Publishers’ Weekly, trade
journal of American book publishing. His lively and enlighten-
ing article on whodunits on the screen answers many questions
readers have asked about the greatest of all American mysteries —
Hollywood.

iJ0090QpOOOOOO(?OO^tOOaOOOOOi;tOOOOOOJ)OQOOOOJ)OOOOOOOOOOOq.

It’s quite all right for the mystery writer to make a fool of me
in a book. If he’s cleverer than I, then I am like the gypsy in For
Whom the Bell Tolls who, upon first examining a watch, cried
out in admiration, “What a com-plic-ca-tionl” But if he’s not as
clever as I, that’s quite all right, too, for then I have him, poor
thing, at my mercy, so to speak; I can be arrogant, superior; I
can yawn at his pages, cut him down to size, toss him away — and
enjoy my victory over him. He can say that the butler did the
murder, or the chief of detectives did it, or charming little Can-
dace (“friends called her Candy”) did it, or the quiet librarian did
it, or Jim did it to shield Mary, or Count Xerxes did it because
Solange had got him under her skin, or Luther he done it because
he didn’t know no better, or the author himself did it, or even
I did it, I the readerl He can say anything he pleases in a book,
put the blame anywhere, solve the mystery in a word or in three
chapters of explanation, write it all in jive talk, put in crossword
puzzles or Egyptian hieroglyphics, play symphonies with colored
wine glasses, cut his victims into long strips of human bacon, paint
a room with blood, kill a woman by taking away her sugar ration
stamps. What the hell. Anything goes — in a book.

298

Hollywoodunit 299

But Hollywood would never approve. In mysteries Hollywood
asks for form, construction, certain well-defined patterns, order,
truth, justice, character. Above all, Hollywood wants to do, in
mysteries, either one of two things: scare the living daylights out
of the audiences, or roll ’em in the aisles. (Incidentally, I have
never actually seen anyone ever roll in the aisles from a picture,
and I am wondering if Hollywood doesn’t sometimes exaggerate,
just a little, perhaps.)

Hollywood is choosey about murder. Because of the Hays code,
crime must be properly punished, evil cannot prevail at the end,
gruesomeness and horror must not be presented too boldly or dis-
gustingly to the eye, sexual crime may be implied hjut never stated
in visual terms. Motherhood may not be defiled, religion must
not be ridiculed. The murderer may not cut a woman’s breasts
off, and if he’s a ripper, the exact nature of the slicing must not
be told nor shown. The corpse, too, must remain singularly un-
mutilated. A little blood from the mouth, perhaps, or<a dark stain
on the clothing over the heart, but no exposed intestines, no head-
less bodies or bodiless heads, no widely distributed limbs or parts,
A clean stab, a straight shot, a strong quick strangulation — that’s
the ticket. Poison in moderation, but no vomiting, please. No ugly
convulsions. (And did you know that if a character in a film ever
swallows any indigestible object, such as a diamond ring, he can
never get it back, because audience imagination can conceive of
only two ways of retrieving it, and both of them are taboo on the
screen?)

Hollywood’s taboos, self imposed by the motion picture indus-
try, are for the protection of the great, literal minded, highly sug-
gestible mass of the people to whom murder is murder and not a
mental exercise. The motion picture differs from the book in this
respect: the former, to the majority of people, is life; the latter, to
a comparatively small minority, is a diversion and an escape. This
may appear to be a paradox, for most of us regard the movies as
an escape. But to the moviegoer, what he sees on the screen he
takes for fact, relative to the nature of the picture; for, in his
view, flesh-and-blood people are going through the motions.

For this reason, the '‘whodunit” — ^in which the author deliber-
ately misleads the reader by concealing the murderous character

Richard Mealand

300

of the villain — is generally poor fare for the screen. The people
who act in pictures are selected for their roles because of the pre-
cise character impressions which they convey to audiences. For in-
stance, the moment you see Walter Pidgeon in a film you know
immediately that he could not do a mean or petty thing. He is
noble. Greer Garson is noble. And no audience would want either
of them to stand on their heads, pick their noses, steal from a
blind man, or murder somebody without good and sufficient rea-
son. Once you assemble the cast of a murder film, the audience
must know instinctively who is good and who is bad, who plays
second fiddle and who brings up the rear. Films which falsely label
the characters of their actors are usually doomed to failure; the
audience is tricked in its judgment of human nature, and audi-
ences don’t like trickery — unless it’s funny.

There have been unfair mystery films, but they haven’t made
much money. Possibly the only exception was Suspicion^ adapted
from Francis lies’ famous book, Before the Fact, in which Cary
Grant came dangerously close to turning into a first class heel.
Alfred Hitchcock made the picture, and he knew that, if he had
stuck to the book, his audiences would have walked out in a body
at the end. So he ‘‘treated” the book for pictures, removing the
unbearable suspicion from Cary’s character in the last reel; the
guy was not really a potential murderer, it only looked that way
for a while to pretty Joan Fontaine. And the result, considered
critically, was a somewhat puzzling picture, not entirely convinc-
ing, even though it did sell tickets. It almost, but finally didn’t,
trick the audience. They could still feel that Cary Grant was, as
he seemed to be, a fine man.

Hitchcock’s earlier success as the creator of a certain type of
mystery film can be attributed to two things: the novelty and
variety of his imagination in the sustaining of suspense, and the
willingness of his audiences to accept his illogical sequences as
logical because he entertained them so well. With one or two
exceptions, Hitchcock’s mysteries simply didn’t make sense. His
plots were full of holes and loose ends, characters appeared point-
lessly and never reappeared, sub-plots emerged and were forgot-
ten. In fact, if he hadn’t the rare gift of holding the '‘hero line”
and the ‘‘menace line” in exactly parallel positions along a track

Hollywoodunit 301

of constantly mounting apprehension, he would have been lost
in a wilderness of ridiculous beginnings without endings. In Re-
becca^ of course, he worked from a soundly constructed book. Be-
ing Hitchcock, he couldn’t go wrong there. And in his other later
pictures he has abandoned his early carefree technique and set-
tled down to solid scripts.

Other successful mystery films have been those in which the
emphasis has been placed not on the working out of an intricate
plot — ^which is often the sole interest in many book mysteries —
but on the charm, amusing qualities, or superior deadly clever-
ness of the detective. I defy any of you to recall one single plot
of any of the Thin Man pictures, in which Myrna Loy and Wil-
liam Powell appeared (and are appearing again). Actually the
crime was negligible except that it offered a temporary menace to
the happy, albeit bibulous, life of Mr, and Mrs. Nick Charles
and dog, Asta. The Saint films were entertaining, not because they
had particularly good stories, but because you liked to watch
George Sanders successfully elude his enemies. Sherlock Holmes
has been interesting on the screen because of Sherlock Holmes
and Watson, not because the plots have any intellectual stimulus
or are memorable. In other words, it’s character that counts in
pictures, which is probably why John Dickson Carr (or Carter
Dickson), good though he is in books, has never scaled the Holly-
wood ramparts with any of his carefully plotted but somewhat life-
less stories. And the same goes for scores of other mystery writers
who are more concerned with puzzles than with people.

The sex crime in films has only recently come into favor, but
the results have been so salutary at the box office that writers have
been influenced away from the straight whodunit into the more
difficult field of the so-called psychological murder drama. Such
films as Double Indemnity ^ The Lodger^ Laura, The Suspect^ The
Woman in the Window (the Hays office spoiled that one) and
others, have made such a hit with audiences that readers of mys-
teries are no longer content with the formula murder story. Five
minutes of real horror in Night Must Fall can do more to make
the confirmed mystery reader a cynic and a skeptic about his read-
ing matter than a whole year’s supply of Mystery Story Magazine
can do. What’s more, the best of Hollywood’s mysteries are so good

Richard Mealand

302

that writers have felt the temptation of big movie offers and have
raised the character quality of their work to an appreciable and
widening extent. Ten years ago the mystery story writer, except
in the classical field, would have been lucky to have earned as
much as a thousand or two from one title. Today, if he’s good, he
can make a fortune from one of his books. The nearer he gets
to the novel, and the farther from the whodunit, the better are
his chances to clean up in one stroke. Hollywood, the stage, and
the radio are all after him, boosting his status from the cent-a-word
class into the dollar or even five-dollar-a-word category. But he
has to create character, and he has to be convincing. The plot is
only incidental.

Gaslightj Experiment Perilous^ The Letter, Ladies in Retire-
ment, The Uninvited are the best fairly recent examples of mys-
tery films which have abandoned the old purely horror aspects
in which Hollywood formerly dressed its mysteries. The monster
motif, the clawed hand reaching out from the concealed panel,
the creaking door, the choked-off scream — all the familiar trap-
pings of the scary film have been repeated so often on the screen
that, like songs on the Hit Parade, they have quickly lost their
power to entertain. When Bob Hope appeared in The Cat and the
Canary and The Ghost Breakers he knocked the old fashioned
horror story into a cocked hat; the result was bound to be such
japery as Arsenic and Old Lace. Now, when audiences go to see
Boris Karloff, they go with bags of peanuts and come out full of
peanuts instead of chewed finger nails. The real horror now lies
elsewhere — ^in psychological exposition of fear and subtle hate and
slow death. As audiences grow increasingly blas6, the screen draws
nearer to the truth.

Oddly enough, the film producer, ranging over the whole mys-
tery story market in his search for new thrills for his voracious
audiences, has been instrumental in bringing a number of hitherto
obscure writers into great popularity in the book world. Dashiell
Hammett had only a small following before the movies took him
up in The Maltese Falcon. Raymond Chandler had written five
or six books and was getting nowhere when Hollywood suddenly
discovered The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, and signed
him up. Now even his least successful book. The Lady in the

Hollywoodunit 303

Lake is going to be produced. Cleve Adams, Cornell Woolrich
(William Irish), Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and half a
dozen others have lately become Important because the films have
brought them out from under their bushels. Even old Wilkie
Collins is being dusted off and rediscovered by the studios, much
to the delight of the anthology boys on Publishers’ Row.

The Murder Mystery, in fact, has attained at last the stature
of the novel, and, in pictures, the budget of the super-colossal
epic. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go back to Lizzie Borden
and try, once again, to come to some conclusion about her. If they
ever try to put her on the screen, in the person of some Holly-
wood glamour girl, so help me. I’ll murder the producer . . .

There’s Murder in the Air
By Ken Crossen

innnro o o o o o ooooooooooooo 0^ 00000D006000000000000

A founder and first executive vice-president of Mystery Writers
of America^ Inc. {the American counterpart of the London De-
tection Club), Ken Crossen is a mystery writer, editor, critic, radio
director, and producer. He writes with authority and from per-
sonal knowledge of the problems of mystery at the microphone.

j?QOQOooj?ftooppj;iooopo^oopojij)ij>j)ooo50poooooj)ooooooQOOoqfi.

Every day, 365 days a year, four and one-half * mystery and de-
tective stories are broadcast to the American radio audience. Ac-
cording to those efficient organizations which make a business of
informing sponsors how many people listen to their programs,
the average radio mystery show will have more than five million
sets tuned in on it, with an average of two listeners per set. To
accomplish this task, advertisers and networks spend approxi-
mately 162,000 per week, or three and a quarter million dollars
annually, exclusive of radio time.

Of the thirty-one shows currently on the air, twelve star detec-
tives who originally appeared in books, and two shows specialize
in adaptations of the ''best” of the published mysteries, yet read-
ers of those books would be hard put to recognize their favorites
after the face-lifting routine of radio. Certainly, the Perry Mason
fan, after hearing that show over CBS, will dig feverishly^ through
his Erie Stanley Gardner books to find the source of this ether
mutation. Similarly, Hammett worshippers have been known to
brood for days after hearing The Thin Man on the air, and then
to forswear mysteries for Spengler.

* This figuTie is based on the week of November 18, 1945, when there were 31
mystery shows on the air on the major networks, all of them contracted for 13 weeks
or longer.

304

There's Murder in the Air

305

Mystery writers, publishers and readers have all become rather
pleased with themselves in the past few years because theyVe
consigned concealed rooms, unknown poisons, and other lazy de-
vices of the early mystery to limbo. Radio, however, proceeds at
its made pace, blissfully unaware of progress. In fact, this igno-
rance is one of the mainstays of the writer and producer of radio
mystery shows. Granting each mystery broadcast one murder for
each performance, there are 1,612 such murders committed an-
nually. Of these, 800 are by gun, and 800 by poison, with the
remaining twelve accomplished through methods dreamed up in
the fertile mind of a radio hack. The less said about the last, the
better.

Death by shooting, on the air, is manufactured with meticulous
attention to how it will sound; the gun shot, the hacking cough
of a man shot through the large intestine, the fall of the body.
But there the care comes to an end. Radio thinks nothing of guns
that leave no powder marks when fired at close range, serial num-
bers that mysteriously vanish, revolvers with the firing power of
rifles. One script on The Falcon had the murderer fire at a woman
from a distance of a few feet, with a Police Positive. The bullet
struck a small Pekingese dog which she held in her arms, killing
-the animal, but the only injury to the woman was being knocked
unconscious. The bullet, apparently bouncing against the tough
hide of the Peke, did not leave a mark on her.

Poison, in the realm of radio, means only one thing — prussic
acid. Victims are fed prussic acid in pill, liquid, or any other form
that seems convenient, and the only identification is the odor.
Therefore, 799 times a year, a radio detective will sniff audibly
into a microphone and mutter something about bitter almonds.

With the exception of five or six shows, the regular police are
always the fatuous morons that they were in books thirty years
ago. Radio networks which object to a script suggesting police
brutality are perfectly content for the guardians of the law to score
•65 I.Q. It is seldom that the police ever think of fingerprinting
a suspect; if they do they bungle it; and they obviously view all
criminology with suspicion. The chief and only clue on a recent
major mystery show was the absence of a bullet hole in the shirt
of a man who had a bullet hole in his chest — ^all of which the

Ken Crossen

306

police had overlooked. The detective discovered this when he
viewed the corpse, still fully clothed, in the morgue.

With few exceptions, the mystery novels of thirty years ago
were pretty sorry affairs, deservedly called ‘'shockers’* or “thrill-
ers.” But in the past twenty-five years, mystery writing has made
significant strides toward literary dignity and maturity of form.
The same cannot be said for radio. The quality of mystery drama
in radio has all the puerility of a bad Edgar Wallace, and, many
times, all the confusion of a Harry Stephen Keeler.

Undoubtedly, a strong factor in the poor quality of mystery
shows is the censorship enforced by networks. Network officials
apparently are under the impression that the American public,
despite the publication of newspapers, millions of copies of mys-
tery and detective magazines, and millions of copies of mystery
novels, has a virginal innocence so far as murder and mayhem are
concerned. A radio mystery show has more don’ts per square inch
than a home for wayward girls. These rules not only concern
methods of murder and morals, but such common practices as
drinking and gambling. Shows have been known to be thrown out
because a policeman struck a criminal. This censorship springs, of
course, from a morbid fear that someone will become angry and
refuse to buy a product. About the only group which can be in-
sulted on the air is the Java Man.

Hand in hand with the censor, goes the problem of the pro-
fessional genius among the networks and agencies. Raised by
hand, and trained by making mountains out of molehills, these
men work their way up the aerial until they are put in charge of
productions. Somewhere along the way, they grow antennae which
take the place of judgment in other fields. One such man, in
charge of all production for a large network, throws out lines in
mystery shows because his “mother wouldn’t understand it.” All
shows over that network, therefore, are beamed for his mother —
which seems to be carrying the “cult of Mom” too far.

The top shows, if you judge by rating, that statistical god of
those who rule the airwaves, or by the appraisal of the radio pro-
fessionals, undoubtedly excel in production; that is, direction, en-
gineering skill and sound technics. But the stories themselves are
too often on a par with those published in horror pulp magazines

There's Murder in the Air 307

following World War L Sex and sadism, often presented coyly
for the sake of the censor, constitute the motif, and the level of
presentation is not far above those magazines which were so heart-
ily and justifiably condemned.

No analysis of radio mysteries, even one as brief as this, would
be complete without mentioning two programs that occasionally
afford a glimpse of the quality that is possible in the air mystery
drama. Suspense and Mystery Theatre^ although their batting av-
erages have not been high, have presented many dramatizations
of mystery novels and short stories that were to the average radio
mystery what Norman Corwin is to Portia Faces Life. Certainly
in such dramatizations as Cocaine by Cornell Woolrich, The Big
Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and Home Sweet Homicide by
Craig Rice, they have proved that radio can do an artistic job
when it chooses to treat mysteries seriously. Unfortunately, Mys-
tery Theatre has always been slightly marred by billing its an-
nouncer as a mystery expert whereas he is merely an AFRA actor
speaking lines mitten by an agency man who believes the third
degree to be an honor given by the Masonic Lodge.

All of this adds up to one glaring conclusion concerning radio
mystery shows: they stand now, despite a huge following and mil-
lions of dollars for the budget, where mystery novels stood thirty
years ago. Since they have maintained good listener ratings, and
successfully sell products, advertising agencies and sponsors have
not been impelled to consider the writing and presentation of
mysteries as a specialized business which cannot be turned over
to radio hacks and directors whose only qualification is a knowl-
edge of the mechanics of a stop watch.

Some day a pioneering sponsor will make the daring plunge
into quality performances of better mystery stories, and sell so
many razor blades, jars of shaving soap, or gallons of wine, that
every other mystery show sponsor will follow suit — the one move
which they always make by instinct.

Until then, what happens to murder on the radio is — murder.

0500000000000000000000000000000000000000

gpcfooooooooBooooodoooiTboooootf’ooooooolsooooooooooooc

THE LIGHTER SIDE

OF CRIME

Watson Was a Woman
By Rex Stout

0 00000 06000000000000000 0 (T ooooooo(roooooo<foooooo(foooo<f

The now-famous travesty on Holmesiological scholarship which
follows was first delivered by the bearded creator of Nero Wolfe
and Archie Goodwin before a dinner meeting of the Baker Street
Irregulars in New York on January 3/^ 1941 — a date that lives in
infamy for all the faithful. Even after the passage of years, Mr.
Stout attends the annual festivities of this august and nominally
peace-loving society only when accompanied by a personal body-
guard.

JP00O0p{>0 0_0 0000p0CtQ0Q0 0J^000 0Jl000p^l0000QJ)pj)(t0 0(lp Oj;[J) Ofl

Gasogene: Tantalus: Buttons: Irregulars:

You will forgive me for refusing to join your commemorative
toast, '‘The Second Mrs. Watson,’' when you learn it was a matter
of conscience. I could not bring myself to connive at the perpetua-
tion of a hoax. Not only was there never a second Mrs. Watson;
there was not even a first Mrs. Watson. Furthermore, there was no
Doctor Watson.

Please keep your chairs.

Like all true disciples, I have always recurrently dipped into
the Sacred Writings (called by the vulgar the Sherlock Holmes
stories) for refreshment; but not long ago I reread them from be-
ginning to end, and I was struck by a singular fact that reminded
me of the dog in the night. The singular fact about the dog in the
night, as we all know, was that it didn’t bark; and the singular
fact about Holmes in the night is that he is never seen going to
bed. The writer of the tales, the Watson person, describes over
and over again, in detail, all the other minutiae of that famous
household — ^suppers, breakfasts, arrangement of furniture, rainy
evenings at home — ^but not once are we shown either Holmes or

Rex Stout

312

Watson going to bed. I wondered, why not? Why such unnatural
and obdurate restraint, nay, concealment, regarding one of the
pleasantest episodes of the daily routine?

I got suspicious.

The uglier possibilities that occurred to me, as that Holmes
had false teeth or that Watson wore a toupee, I rejected as pre-
posterous. They were much too obvious, and shall I say unsinister.
But the game was afoot, and I sought the trail, in the only field
available to me, the Sacred Writings themselves. And right at the
very start, on page 9 of ^4 Study in Scarlet^ I found this:

... It was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had
invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning.

I was indescribably shocked. How had so patent a clue escaped
so many millions of readers through the years? That was, that
could only be, a woman speaking of a man. Read it over. The true
authentic speech of a wife telling of her husband’s — ^but wait. I
was not indulging in idle speculation, but seeking evidence to
establish a fact. It was unquestionably a woman speaking of a
man, yes, but whether a wife of a husband, or a mistress of a
lover, ... I admit I blushed. I blushed for Sherlock Holmes, and
I closed the book. But the fire of curiosity was raging in me, and
soon I opened again to the same page, and there in the second
paragraph I saw:

The reader may set me down as a hopeless busybody, when I
confess how much this man stimulated my curiosity, and how often
I endeavored to break through the reticence which he showed on all
that concerned himself.

You bet she did. She would. Poor Holmes! She doesn’t even
bother to employ one of the stock euphemisms, such as, *1 wanted
to understand him better,” or, ‘T wanted to share things with
him.” She proclaims it with brutal directness, ”I endeavored to
break through the reticence.” I shuddered, and for the first time
in my life felt that Sherlock Holmes was not a god, but human
— human by his suffering. Also, from that one page I regarded
the question of the Watson person’s sex as settled for good. In-
dubitably she was a female, but wife or mistress? I went on. Two
pages later I found:

Watson Was a Woman 313

... his powers upon the violin ... at my request he has played
me some of Mendelssohn’s Lieder . .

Imagine a man asking another man to play him some of Men-
delssohn’s Lieder on a violini

And on the next page:

... I rose somewhat earlier than usual, and found that Sherlock
Holmes had not yet finished his bteakfast . . . my place had not
been laid nor my coffee prepared. With . . . petulance ... I
rang tlie bell and gave a curt intimation that I was ready. Then I
picked up a magazine from the table and attempted to while away
the time with it, while my companion munched silently at his
toast.

That is a terrible picture, and you know and I know how bit-
terly realistic it is. Change the diction, and it is practically a love
story by Ring Lardner. That Sherlock Holmes, like other men,
had breakfasts like that is a hard pill for a true disciple to swal-
low, but we must face the facts. The chief thing to note of this
excerpt is that it not only reinforces the conviction that Watson
was a lady — that is to say, a woman — but also it bolsters our hope
that Holmes did not through all those years live in sin. A man
does not munch silently at his toast when breakfasting with his
mistress; or, if he does, it won’t be long until he gets a new one.
But Holmes stuck to her — or she to him — for over a quarter of
a century. Here are a few quotations from the later years:

. . . Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me. ... I rose to
my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and
then it appears that I must have fainted. . . .”

— “The Adventure of the Empty House,” page 4.

I believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals.

— “The Tragedy of Birlstone,” page i.

The relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He
was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had
become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag
tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps
less excusable.

— “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” page i.

Rex Stout

And we have been expected to believe that a man wrote those
things! The frank and unconcerned admission that she fainted at
sight of Holmes after an absence! *1 am one of the most long-
suffering of mortals” — the oldest uxorial cliche in the world;
Aeschylus used it; no doubt cave-men gnashed their teeth at it!
And the familiar pathetic plaint, “As an institution I was like the
old black pipe!”

Yes, uxorial, for surely she was wife. And the old black pipe
itself provides us with a clincher on that point. This comes from
page i6 of The Hound of the Baskervilles:

. . . did not return to Baker Street until evening. It was nearly nine
o'clock when I found myself in the sitting-room once more.

My first impression as I opened the door was that a fire had
broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke that the light of
the lamp upon the table was blurred by it. As I entered, however,
my fears were set at rest, for it was the aaid fumes of strong coarse
tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through
the haze I had a vague vision of Holmes in his dressing-gown coiled
up in an armchair with his black clay pipe between his lips. Several
rolls of paper lay around him.

“Caught cold, Watson?” said he.

“No, it's this poisonous atmosphere.”

“I suppose it is pretty thick, now that you mention it.”

“Thick! It is intolerable!”

“Open the window, then!”

I say husband and wife. Could anyone alive doubt it after read-
ing that painful banal scene? Is there any need to pile on the evi-
dence?

For a last-ditch skeptic there is more evidence, much more. The
efforts to break Holmes of the cocaine habit, mentioned in various
places in the Sacred Writings, display a typical reformist wife in
action, especially the final gloating over her success. A more com-
plicated, but no less conclusive, piece of evidence is the strange,
the astounding recital of Holmes's famous disappearance, in “The
Final Problem,” and the reasons given therefore in a later tale,
“The Adventure of the Empty House.” It is incredible that this
monstrous deception was not long ago exposed.

Watson Was a Woman 315

Holmes and Watson had together wandered up the valley of the
Rhone, branched off at Leuk, made their way over the Gemmi
Pass, and gone on, by way of Interlaken, to Meiringen. Near that
village, as they were walking along a narrow trail high above a
tremendous abyss, Watson was maneuvered back to the hotel by
a fake message. Learning that the message was a fake, she (he)
flew back to their trail, and found that Holmes was gone. No
Holmes. All that was left of him was a polite and regretful note
of farewell, there on a rock with his cigarette case for a paper-
weight, saying that Professor Moriarty had arrived and was about
to push him into the abyss.

That in itself was rather corny. But go on to “The Adventure
of the Empty House.” Three years have passed. Sherlock Holmes
has suddenly and unexpectedly reappeared in London, causing the
Watson person to collapse in a faint. His explanation of his long
absence is fantastic. He says that he had grappled with Professor
Moriarty on the narrow trail and tossed him into the chasm; that,
in order to deal at better advantage with the dangerous Sebastian
Moran, he had decided to make it appear that he too had toppled
over the cliff; that, so as to leave no returning footprints on the
narrow trail, he had attempted to scale the upper cliff, and, while
he was doing so, Sebastian Moran himself had appeared up above
and thrown rocks at him; that by herculean efforts he had eluded
Moran and escaped over the mountains; that for three years he
had wandered around Persia and Tibet and France, communi-
cating with no one but his brother Mycroft, so that Sebastian
Moran would think he was dead. Though by his own account
Moran knew, must have known, that he had got away!

That is what Watson says that Holmes told her (him). It is
simply gibberish, below the level even of a village half-wit. It is
impossible to suppose that Sherlock Holmes ever dreamed of im-
posing on any sane person with an explanation like that; it is
impossible to believe that he would insult his own intelligence
by offering such an explanation even to an idiot. I deny that he
ever did. I believe that all he said, after Watson recovered from
the faint, was this, “My dear, I am willing to try it again,*' for
he was a courteous man. And it was Watson, who, attempting to
cook up an explanation, made such a terrible hash of it

Rex Stout

316

Then who was this person whose nom de plume was “Doctor
Watson'? Where did she come from? What was she like? What
was her name before she snared Holmes?

Let us see what we can do about the name, by methods that
Holmes himself might have used. It was Watson who wrote the
immortal tales, therefore if she left a record of her name any-
where it must have been in the tales themselves. But what we
are looking for is not her characteristics or the facts of her life,
but her name^ that is to say, her title; so obviously the place to
look is in the titles of the tales.

There are sixty of the tales all told. The first step is to set them
down in chronological order, and number them from 1 to 60.
Now, which shall we take first? Evidently the reason why Watson
was at such pains to conceal her name in this clutter of titles was
to mystify us, so the number to start with should be the most
mystical number, namely seven. And to make it doubly sure, we
shall make it seven times seven, which is 49. Very well. The 49th
tale is “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client." We of course
discard the first four words, “The Adventure of the," which are
repeated in most of the titles. Result: “ILLUSTRIOUS
CLIENT.”

The next most significant thing about Watson is her (his) con-
stant effort to convince us that those things happened exactly as
she (he) tells them; that they are on the square. Good. The first
square of an integer is the integer 4, We take the title of the
4th tale and get “RED-HEADED LEAGUE."

We proceed to elimination. Of all the factors that contribute
to an ordinary man's success, which one did Holmes invariably
exclude, or eliminate? Luck. In crap-shooting, what are the lucky
numbers? Seven and eleven. But we have already used 7, which
eliminates it, so there is nothing left but 1 1. The 1 ith tale is about
the “ENGINEER'S THUMB."

Next, what was Holmes's age at the time he moved to Baker
Street? Twenty-seven. The syth tale is the adventure of the
“NORWOOD BUILDER." And what was Watson's age? Twenty-
six. The 26th tale is the adventure of the “EMPTY HOUSE."
But there is no need to belabor the obvious. Just as it is a simple
matter to decipher the code of the Dancing Men when Holmes

Watson Was a Woman

317

has once put you on the right track, so can you, for yourself, make
the additional required selections now that I have explained the
method. And you will inevitably get what I got:

Illustrious Client
Red-Headed League
Engineer's Thumb
Norwood Builder
Empty House

Wisteria Lodge
Abbey Grange
Twisted Lip
Study in Scarlet
Orange Pips
Noble Bachelor

And, acrostically simple, the initial letters read down, the care-
fully hidden secret is ours. Her name was Irene Watson.

But not so fast. Is there any way of checking that? Of discover-
ing her name by any other method, say a priori? We can try and
see. A woman wrote the stories about Sherlock Holmes, that has
been demonstrated; and that woman was his wife. Does there ap-
pear, anywhere in the stories, a woman whom Holmes fell for?
Whom he really cottoned to? Indeed there does. “A Scandal in
Bohemia*' opens like this:

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. ... In his eyes
she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

And what was the name of the woman? Irene!

But, you say, not Irene Watson, but Irene Adler. Certainly.
Watson's whole purpose, from beginning to end, was to confuse
and bewilder us regarding her identity. So note that name well.
Adler. What is an adler, or, as it is commonly spelled, addler?
An addler is one who, or that which, addles. Befuddles, Confuses.
I admit I admire that stroke; it is worthy of Holmes himself.
In the very act of deceiving and confusing us, she has the audacity
to employ a name that brazenly announces her purpose!

An amusing corroborative detail about this Irene of “Scandal
in Bohemia*' — the woman to Holmes according to the narrator of

Rex Stout

318

the tales — ^is that Holmes was present at her wedding at the
Church of St. Monica in the Edgeware Road. It is related that he
was there as a witness, but that is pure poppycock. Holmes him-
self says, “I was half-dragged up to the altar, and before I knew
where I was I found myself mumbling responses. . . Those
are not the words of an indifferent witness, but of a reluctant, en-
snared, bulldozed man — in short, a bridegroom. And in all the
1323 pages of the Sacred Writings, that is the only wedding we
ever see — the only one, so far as we are told, that Holmes ever
graced with his presence.

All this is very sketchy. I admit it. I am now collecting material
for a fuller treatment of the subject, a complete demonstration
of the evidence and the inevitable conclusion. It will fill two
volumes, the second of which will consist of certain speculations
regarding various concrete results of that long-continued and —
I fear, alas — ^none-too-happy union. For instance, what of the par-
entage of Lord Peter Wimsey, who was born, I believe, around
the turn of the century — about the time of the publication of
“The Adventure of the Second Stain*? That will bear looking
into.

Don’t Guess, Let Me Tell You
By Ogden Nash

boooooooboooooo'b o (fb oooooooooooooooooooiTboooooo boo o o o'

Ogden Nash is a widely known American humorous poet and
satirist. Not the least of his achievements is his feat of attaching
the telling label "'Had-I-But-Known** to a school of mystery writ-
ing about which the less said the more chivalrous. The selection
below is from a collection of Mr. Nash's verse entitled The Face
is Familiar (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940).

p 0 0 0 0 0 0 q 0 0 0 pj> 0 0 0 0 o/i 0 0 0 0 0 0 Qp 0 0 0 opp 0 qp op j[^o 0 0 (ip 0 0^.

Personally, I don't care whether a detective-story writer was edu-
cated in night school or day school.

So long as he doesn't belong to the H.I.B.K. school,

The H.I.B.K. being a device to which too many detective-story
writers are prone;

Namely, the Had I But Known.

Sometimes it is the Had I But Known what grim secret lurked be-
hind that smiling exterior, I would never have set foot
within the door;

Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now, I could
have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspec-
tor the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole
in the floor.

Had I But Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak
at midnight in the tower where the body lies and, in-
stead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy police-
man posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves
to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled
behind them.

320 Ogden Nash

And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the
men from the D.A/s office come in next morning and
find them.

Had I But Known-ers are quick to assume the prerogatives of
the Deity,

For they will suppress evidence that doesn’t suit their theories
with appalling spontaneity.

And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some
elaborate device of the Had I But Known-ers some hun-
dred pages later than if they hadn’t held their knowledo-e
aloof,

Why, they say, Why, Inspector, I knew all along it was he, but I
couldn’t tell you, you would have laughed at me unless
I had absolute proof.

Would you like for your library a nice detective story which I
am sorry to say I didn’t rent but owns?

I wouldn’t have bought it had I but known it was impregnated
with Had I But Knowns.

"o 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 6 0 S’ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" 0 0 fl 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

The late American humorist Christopher Ward {i 868 -ip 4 ^) was
the author of the following parody, which appeared in the Sat-
urday Review of Literature for November 2, at the height
of the S. S. Van Dine-Philo Vance vogue*

jUijULSLP 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 go 0 p 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 a 0 (UL2JLP 0 0 0 0 j)j) 0 0 ctp 0 0 0 0 0 o_(t

The Pink Murder Case
Bj S. S. Veendam

Author*o£ the ''Green,” "Canary,” "Mauve,” and "Beige Murder

Cases”

CHAPTER I

The House on the Marsh

{Tuesday, February 22, 1732; 1 A*M)

Among all the vari-colored murder cases from which Philo Pants
has derived his reputation and I my income during the last few
years, certainly there was none more horrifying, nor, in its out-
come, more astounding than the Pink one.

My friend Pants was, as I have often written, a young social
aristocrat with carefully chiselled features, especially a fine, hand-
engraved, aquamarine nose. His conversation was the most com-
pletely satisfying I have ever known. No one ever felt the need
of a second dose.

He was a close friend of Barker,^ the District Attorney, who
entrusted to him the most interesting murder cases, much to my
profit, since thus the murderer was given time to kill a whole
book-full of people, f which is really necessary nowadays to keep

* George A. (‘^Gabby*’) Barker was the most efficient District Attorney of that
name New York ever had. After retirement from office, he became a private citizen,
f The Blue Murder Case (Scribblers, 1929; I2.50).

The Cardinal Murder Case (Scribblers, 1927; $2.50).

321

322 Christopher Ward

the reader’s interest. So it was that the frightful Pink holocaust
was made possible. Pants had been for several days immersed in
a Coptic translation of Schizzenheimer’s “Nuovi Studi de la Physi-
ologic des Heisshundes.” He could not read Coptic, but was try-
ing to decide which was the right side up of the fascinating vol-
ume, when Barker came in.

“A new murder for you. Pants,” said Barker gloomily.

“Oh, I say, don’t y’ know, eh what?” drawled Pants. “How
dashed amusin’. Most intriguin’ and all that sort of thing.
I could bear to hear about the bally homicide, old bean, don’t
y’ know.”

Barker frowned, glowered, and gritted his teeth. Pants’s parts
of speech always had this effect on him.

“It’s a Pink case this time,” he grumbled. “They’re bad enough
plain, but when they come in colors they’re devilish. Some day
a Scotch plaid will turn up and finish me.”

“Who’s the jolly old victim of the distressin’ crime? My flut-
terin’ heart’s anguished to know.”

Barker tore his hair and spat through his teeth grudgingly.
“Alonzo Pink,” he said, with biting sarcasm.

“I say, y’ know, you don’t say so,” drawled Pants. “Old pal of
mine. Spent last evenin’ with him, discussin’ terra cotta orna-
mentation of renaissance patisseries and all that. Dead, eh? Amus-
in’ predicament, eh what?”

“Know any other Pinks?” asked Barker in a rage.

“Whole dashed lot, Citronella and Palooka, sisters, Hercules,
brother, contemp’ry offspring of heredit-ry sire, old Paresis Pink,
bally old blighter.”

“Come along, then,” gargled Barker furiously.

CHAPTER 11

Shrieks in the Night

{Tuesday y December 25, 1929; 3 A- M.)

The Pink mansion stood on Broadway three blocks south of
the Battery, a gloomy pile, embowered in funereal yews and gaunt

The Pink Murder Case 323

weeping willows. A foreboding of woe came over me as we neared
its ghastly portal.

Snoot, the butler, admitted us. A man of more sinister aspect
I have never seen. He had but one eye on each side of his nose
and his mouth was practically horizontal. In a sepulchral voice,
he told us he had found Alonzo dead in his bedroom, shot through
the head, and that all the doors and windows were locked on the
inside. A Colt .32 lay by his side. Then he took us to the chamber
of death.

“Oh, I say, my wordr’ drawled Pants. “How dashed amusin’!*'

“What?” barked Barker.

“Don't notice anything funny, eh? Of course, you wouldn’t.
Why, man, the jolly old corpse is standin* on its head.”

And so it was, but only the quick eye of Philo Pants had marked
the fact.

“Now,” drawled Pants, “we'll interview the caressin' family.”

Citronella Pink met us in the library. She was gently but firmly
dressed in a jade green bathing suit, a brown bowler, and white
spats. She was a beautiful woman, but something about her made
me think of either Lucrezia Borgia or Lizzie Borden or both.

“Ever do any shootin’, Citronella?” drawled Pants.

“Lots,” she said nonchalantly, whipping out a Colt .32.

“Ever shoot Alonzo?”

“Don't you wish you knew?” she said teasingly. “Ask Here, he
knows.”

We found Hercules and his sister, Palooka, in the garage. They
were shooting at each other with .32 Colts, but, as he had a hare-
lip and St. Vitus's dance and she was cockeyed, neither had hit
the other. Pants turned to Barker.

“Think I'll take on this amusin' pair aftefr dinner,” he drawled.
“Give the servants jolly old once over now.”

The entire staff was paraded for inspection. They all looked
like jailbirds, and it was, indeed, found that they all were. Sus-
picion having thus been satisfactorily distributed, Pants dismissed
Barker. “Run along, old fruit,” he drawled. “I'll carry on with
silly old*Veendam.”

324 Christopher Ward

CHAPTER III

Ghouls and Vampires
(Thursday, April i, 1066; 4 A.M)

At 9:30 the next morning Pants, in purple velvet pajamas, was
sipping his cognac as he idly turned the leaves of an illuminated
copy of Teufelsdrockh’s **Ichweissnicht Wassolles Bedeutendass
Ichsotraurigbin,*’ when our phone rang.

“Barker speaking,” said an agitated voice. “Pink case again.
Palooka and Hercules found dead in rooms. Doors and windows
all locked inside. Colt .32 by side each. Come at once. Mother.”

“How deuced annoyin',” drawled Pants. “Must go around to
jolly old slaughter-house again.”

We met Barker there. “Undoubtedly an inside job,” said he,
“though it probably started outside. Ku-Klux, I think, with a
dash of Mafia and a sprinkling of Paprika. By their fingerprints
I've identified Snoot as the late Belle Boyd, the Beautiful Rebel
Spy, and the parlor maid as Jesse James.”

Pants looked at him with pained surprise. “Listen, Barker,” he
said earnestly. “There’s something terrible going on here. Can’t
you feel it? In this lonely old mansion — poor thing! — polluted
with a miasma of corrupt and rotting ambitions, black hatreds,
hideous impulses, rheumatism, catarrh, coughs, colds, and indi-
gestion — in this loathly mansion three bozos have been bumped
off. Deuced amusin', eh what? Must have little old parley-voo with
Citronella. Roll along, old egg. Toodle-00 and all that sort of
thing.”

Gasping with rage. Barker left Philo Pants, the master-mind,
to pursue his inquiries.

CHAPTER IV
Red Darrell's Revenge
(SL Valentine's Day, 1444, 5 A,M.)

At 9:30 the following morning Barker again appeared at our
apartment. He was accompanied by Detective Bogan * and two

Thomas Aquiaas Bogan was first on the scene oi the murders of Elwell and

The Pink Murder Case 325

policemen. Pants greeted the party with his usual charming in-
souciance.

“Ah, bobbies, what? Why the parade?’*

“New development in the Pink case,” said Barker in a tone of
forbearance. “Citroneila dead as per former plans and specifica-
tions.”

“Pinks all wiped out, eh?” drawled Pants brightly. “No more
cannon-fodder, crime wave will subside.”

“Wait a bit,” hissed Barker, “Fve been studying this case and
I’ve reached certain conclusions. First, these victims were all
found dead in locked rooms, shot through heads with .32 calibre
bullets and — mark this hitherto disregarded fact — 2. .32 Colt was
found by the side of each I Do you see what that means? I didn’t
until Bogan told me. It was in each and every case — suicide/* His
voice sunk to a whisper as he pronounced the unexpected and
dreadful word.

“Very well,” he went on. “ ‘Why?’ I asked Bogan. He answered
like a flash — ‘Bughouse.’ A logical working hypothesis, I said to
myself. ‘Why bughouse?’ I asked Bogan. He answered in two
words. But before I tell you what they were let me ask you a few
questions. Who was with Alonzo Pink the evening before he shot
himself? Who questioned Hercules and Palooka the day before
their fatal night? Who ‘parley-vooed’ with Citroneila before she
shuffled off? The answer is in the two words of the astute Bogan
— Philo Pants!

“It was you. Pants. Your blithering blah, your musical-comedy
English accent drove these people mad, made them fly for relief
to self-destruction. You are their murderer. And you, Veendam,
were not only his wretched accomplice in this case, but your
books, disseminating his words, have sowed the seeds of madness
in many homes. Arrest these meni”

As the cops stepped forward, Philo Pants lightly laughed and,
unscrewing the tip of his aquamarine nose, took from a cavity
within two pellets.

“Catch, old dear,” he drawled, as he tossed one to me. “Sorry

Arnold Rothstein and in the Dorothy Arnold disappearance case. He is now raising
turtle-doves in Hoboken.

3^6 Christopher Ward

to disappoint, old fruit,” he said to Barker. “It’s dashed distressin’,
but must say toodle-oo and all that sort of thing.”

Then together we swallowed the pellets and in a moment we
both lay dead upon the floor.

“As usual,” said Barker resignedly, “cyanide of potassium.”

Murder at $2.50 a Crime
By Stephen Leacock

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ol) OOOO'OOtfOOOOOOOOOOOOOboOOOOOOOOOOiTo binnnnnr

The beloved Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock {1869-1944)
was a lifelong devotee of detective stories and wrote and lectured
frequently on the subject. The selection below is from his Here
Are My Lectures and Stories {New York: Dodd, Mead, 1937; Lon-
don: Lane, 1938).

j?OOOOOOJ>pOOOOqOp;)QOOOOOOOOOvPOOOpOOOOqQJ>OQi) 00000000 0,

I PROPOSE tonight, ladies and gentlemen, to deal with murder.
There are only two subjects that appeal nowadays to the general
public, murder and sex; and, for people of culture, sex-murder.
Leaving out sex for the minute — if you can — I propose tonight to
talk about murder as carried on openly and daily at two dollars
and fifty cents a crime.

For me, I admit right away that if I’m going to pay two dol-
lars and fifty cents for a book I want to make sure that there’s
going to be at least one murder in it. I always take a look at the
book first to see if there’s a chapter headed ‘"Finding of the Body.”
And I know that everything is all right when it says, The body
was that of an elderly gentleman, well dressed but upside down.
Always, you notice, an “elderly gentleman.” What they have
against us, I don’t know. But you see, if it said that the body was
that of a woman — that’s a tragedy. The body was that of a child!
— ^that’s a hoxTor. But the body was that of an elderly gentleman
— oh, pshaw! that’s all right. Anyway he’s had his life — ^he’s had
a good time (It says he’s well dressed.) — ^probably been out on a
hoot. (He’s found upside down.) That’s all right! He’s worth
more dead than alive.

328 Stephen Leacock

But as a matter of fact, from reading so many of these stories
I get to be such an expert that I don’t have to wait for the finding
of the body. I can tell just by a glance at the beginning of the
book who’s going to be the body. For example, if the scene is laid
on this side of the water, say in New York, look for an opening
paragraph that runs about like this:

Mr. Phineas Q, Cactus sat in his downtown office in the drowsy
hour of a Saturday afternoon. He was alone. Work was done for
the day. The clerks were gone. The building, save for the janitor,
who lived in the basement, was empty.

Notice that, save for the janitor. Be sure to save him. We’re
going to need him later on, to accuse him of the murder.

As he sat thus, gazing in a sort of reverie at the papers on the
desk in front of him, his chin resting on his hand, his eyes closed
and slumber stole upon him.

Of coursel To go to sleep like that in a downtown deserted
office is a crazy thing to do in New York — let alone Chicago. Every
intelligent reader knows that Mr. Cactus is going to get a crack
on the cocoanut. He’s the body.

But if you don’t mind my saying so, they get a better setting
for this kind of thing in England than they do with us. You need
an bid country to get a proper atmosphere around murder. The
best murders (always of elderly gentlemen) are done in the coun-
try at some old country seat — ^any wealthy elderly gentleman has
a seat — called by such a name as the Priory, or the Doggery, or
the Chase — that sort of thing.

Try this for example:

Sir Charles Althorpe sat alone in his library at Althorpe Chase.
It was late at night. The fire had burned low in the grate.
Through the heavily curtained windows no sound came from out-
side. Save for the maids, who slept in a distant wing, and save
for the butler, whose pantry was under the stairs, the Chase, at
this time of the year, was empty. As Sir Charles sat thus in his
arm-chair, his head gradually sank upon his chest and he dozed
off into slumber.

Foolish man! Doesn’t he know that to doze off into slumber in

Murder at $2.^0 a Crime 329

an isolated country house, with the maids in a distant wing, is
little short of madness? But do you notice — Sir Charles! He’s a
baronet. That’s the touch to give class to it. And do you notice that
we have saved the butler, just as we did the janitor? Of course he
didn’t really kill Sir Charles, but the local police always arrest the
butler. And anyway, he’d been seen sharpening a knife on his pants
in his pantry and saying, *T 11 do for the old Devil yet.”

So there is the story away to a good start — Sir Charles’s Body
found next morning by a “terrified” maid — all maids are terrified
— who “could scarcely give an intelligent account of what she
saw” — they never can. Then the local police (Inspector Higgin-
bottom of the Hopshire Constabulary) are called in and announce
themselves “balHed.” Every time the reader hears that the local
police are called in he smiles an indulgent smile and knows they
are just there to be baffled.

At this point of the story enters the Great Detective, specially
sent by or through Scotland Yard. That’s another high class touch
— Scotland Yard. It’s not a Yard, and it’s not in Scotland. Know-
ing it only from detective fictions I imagine it is a sort of club
somewhere near the Thames in London. You meet the Prime
Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury going in and out
all the time — but so strictly incognito that you don’t know that
it is them, I mean that they are it. And apparently even “royalty”
is found “closeted” with heads at the yard — “royalty” being in
English a kind of hush-word for things too high up to talk about.

Well, anyway, the Yard sends down the Great Detective, either
as an official or as an outsider to whom the Yard appeal when
utterly stuck; and he comes down to the Chase, looking for clues.

Here comes in a little technical difficulty in the narration of
the story. We want to show what a wonderful man the Great De-
tective is, and yet he can’t be made to tell the story himself. He’s
too silent — ^and too strong. So the method used nowadays is to
have a sort of shadow along with him, a companion, a sort of
Poor Nut, full of admiration but short on brains. Ever since

330 Stephen Leacock

Conan Doyle started this plan with Sherlock and Watson, all the
others have copied it. So the story is told by this secondary per-
son. Taken at his own face value he certainly is a Poor Nut.
Witness the way in which his brain breaks down utterly and is
set going again by the Great Detective. The scene occurs when^he
Great Detective begins to observe all the things around the place
that were overlooked by Inspector Higginbottom.

'"But how,*' I exclaimed, "how in the name of all that is in-
comprehensible, are you able to aver that the criminal wore rub-
bersr

My friend smiled quietly.

"You observe," he said, "that patch of fresh mud about ten feet
square in front of the door of the house. If you would look, you
will see that it has been freshly walked over by a man with rub-
bers on."

I looked. The marks of the rubbers were there plain enough —
at least a dozen of them.

"What a fool I was!" I exclaimed. "But at least tell me how
you were able to know the length of the criminal's foot?"

My friend smiled again, his same inscrutable smile.

"By measuring the print of the rubber," he answered quietly,
"and then subtracting from it the thickness of the material multi-
plied by two."

"Multiplied by two!" I exclaimed. "Why by two?"

"For the toe and the heel."

"Idiot that I am," I cried, "it all seems so plain when you ex-
plain it."

In other words, the Poor Nut makes an admirable narrator.
However much fogged the reader may get, he has at least the com-
fort of knowing that the Nut is far more fogged than he is. In-
deed, the Nut may be said, in a way, to personify the ideal reader,
that is to say the stupidest — the reader who is most completely
bamboozled with the mystery, and yet intensely interested.

Such a reader has the support of knowing that the police are
entirely “baffled*' — that's always the word for them; that the pub-
lic are “mystified”; that the authorities are “alarmed”; the news-
papers “in the dark”; and the Poor Nut, altogether up a tree. On
those terms, the reader can enjoy his own ignorance to the full.

Murder at $2,$o a Crime 331

Before the Great Detective gets to work, or rather while he is
getting to work, the next thing is to give him character ^ individ-
uality. Ks no use to say that he “doesn’t in the least look like a
detective.” Of course not. No detective ever does. But the point
is not what he doesn’t look like, but what he does look like.

Well, for one thing, though its pretty stale, he can be made
extremely thin, in fact, “cadaverous.” Why a cadaverous man can
solve a mystery better than a fat man it is hard to say; presumably,
the thinner a man is, the more acute is his mind. At any rate,
the old school of writers preferred to have their detectives lean.
This incidentally gave the detective a face “like a hawk,” the writer
not realizing that a hawk is one of the stupidest of animals. A de-
tective with a face like an orang-outang would beat it all to bits.

Indeed, the Great Detective’s face becomes even more impor-
tant than his body. Here there is absolute unanimity. His face
has to be “inscrutable.” Look at it though you will, you can never
read it. Contrast it, for example, with the face of Inspector Hig-
ginbottom, of the local police force. Here is a face that can look
“surprised.” or “relieved,” or, with great ease, “completely baf-
fled.”

But the face of the Great Detective knows of no such changes.
No wonder the Poor Nut is completely mystified. From the face
of the great man you can’t tell whether the cart in which they
are driving jolts him or whether the food at the Inn gives him
indigestion.

To the Great Detective’s face there used to be added the old-
time expedient of not allowing him either to eat or drink. And
when it was added that during this same period of about eight
days the sleuth never slept, the reader could realize in what fine
shape his brain would be for working out his “inexorable chain
of logic.”

But nowadays this is changed. The Great Detective not only
eats, but he eats well. Often he is presented as a connoisseur in
food. Thus:

*'Stop a bit/* Thus speaks the Great Detective to the Poor Nut
and Inspector Higginbottomj whom he is dragging round with
him as usual, ^'We have half an hour before the train leaves Pad-
dington, Let us have some dinner, I know an Italian restaurant

332 Stephen Leacock

near here where they serve frogs' legs a la Marengo better than
anywhere else in London."

A few minutes later we were seated at one of the tables of a
dingy little eating place whose sign board with the words ''Restau-
ranto Italmio" led me to the deduction that it was an Italian
restaurant. I was amazed to observe that my friend was evidently
well known in the place, while his order for ''three glasses of
Chianti with two drops of vermicelli in each" called for an ob-
sequious bow from the appreciative padrone. I realized that this
amazing man knew as much of the finesse of Italian wines as he
did of playing the saxophone.

We may go further. In many up-to-date cases the detective not
only gets plenty to eat but a liberal allowance of strong drink.
One generous British author of today is never tired of handing
out to the Great Detective and his friends what he calls a “stiff
whiskey and soda.” At all moments of crisis they get one.

For example, when they find the body of Sir Charles Althorpe,
late owner of Althorpe Chase, a terrible sight, lying on the floor
of the library, what do they do? They reach at once to the side-
board and pour themselves out a “stiff whiskey and soda.” It cer-
tainly is a great method.

But in the main we may say that all this stuff about eating
and drinking has lost its importance. The Great Detective has to
be made exceptional by some other method.

And here is where his music comes in. It transpires — not at
once but in the first pause in the story — that this great man not
only can solve a crime, but has the most extraordinary aptitude
for music, especially for dreamy music of the most difficult kind.
As soon as he is left in the Inn room with the Poor Nut, out comes
his saxophone and he tunes it up.

"What were you playing?" I asked, as my friend at last folded
his beloved instrument into its case.

"Beethoven's Sonata in Q," he answered modestly.

"Good Heavens!" I exclaimed.

Up to this point the story, any detective story, has been a
howling success. The body has been found; they’re all baffled and

Murder at $2.$o a Crime 333

full of whiskey and soda, and everything’s fine! But the only
trouble is how to go on with iti You can’t! There’s no way to
make crime really interesting except at the start; it’s a pity they
have to go on, that they can’t just stay baffled and full, and call it
a day.

But now begin the mistakes and the literary fallacies that spoil
a crime story. At this point in comes the heroine — the heroine! —
who has no real place in a murder story but is just a left-over rem-
nant of the love story. In she comes, Margaret Althorpe, wild and
all dishevelled. No wonder she’s wild! Who wouldn’t be? And di-
shevelled — oh, yes, the best writers always dishevel them up like
that. In she comes, almost fainting! What do they do, Inspector
Higginbottom and the Great Detective? They shoot a “stiff whis-
key and soda” into her — and hit one themselves at the same time.

And with that, you see, the story drifts off sideways so as to
work up a love-interest in the heroine, who has no business in it
at all. Making a heroine used to be an easy thing in earlier books
when the reading public was small. The author just imagined
the kind of girl that he liked himself and let it go at that. Walter
Scott, for example, liked them small — ^size three — “sylph-like” was
the term used; in fact the heroine was just a “slip of a girl” —
the slippier the better.

But Margaret Althorpe has to please everybody at once. So the
description of her runs like this:

Margaret Althorpe was neither short nor tall,

— ^That means that she looked pretty tall standing up but when
she sat down she was sawed off.

. . . Her complexion neither dark nor fair, and her religion
was neither Protestant nor Roman Catholic, She was not a pro-^
hibitionist but never took more than a couple of gins at a time.
Her motto was, ''No, boys, thafs all I can hold/*

That at least is about the spirit of the description. But even
at that, description of what is called her “person” is not sufficient
by itself. There is the question of her “temperament” as well. Un-
less a heroine has “temperament” she can’t get by; and tempera-
ment consists in undergoing a great many physiological changes

334 Stephen Leacock

in a minimum of time. Here, for example, are the physiological
variations undergone by the heroine of a book I read the other
day, in what appeared to be a space of seventeen minutes:

A new gladness ran through her.

A thrill coursed through her (presumably in the opposite di-
rection).

Something woke up within her that had been dead.

A great yearning welled up within her.

Something seemed to go out from her that was not of her nor
to her.

Everything sank within her.

That last means, I think, that something had come unhooked.

But, you see, by this turn the novel has reached what the diplo-
mats call an impasse^ and plainer people simply a cul de sac or a
ne plus ultra. It can’t get on. They arrested the butler. He didn’t
do It. Apparently nobody did it.

In other words all detective stories reach a point where the
reader gets impatient and says to himself: *'Come now; some-
body murdered Sir CharlesI Out with it.” And the writer has no
answer. All the old attempts at an answer suitable for literary
purposes have been worn thin. There used to be a simple and
easy solution of a crime mystery by finding that the murder was
done by a '‘tramp.” In the old Victorian days the unhappy crea-
ture called a tramp had no rights that the white man had to re-
spect,, either in fiction or out of it. They’d hang a tramp as un-

Murder at $2.^0 a Crime ggg

concernedly as they’d catch a butterfly. And if he belonged to the
class called a “villainous-looking tramp” he registered as A.i., and
his execution (indicated but not described) was part of the happy
ending, along with Margaret Althorpe’s marriage to the Poor
Nut as a by-product on the side — ^not of course to the Great De-
tective. Marriage is not for him. He passes on to the next mys-
tery, in which “royalty” itself is deeply concerned.

But all the tramp stuff is out of date. With a hundred million
people “on the dole” and on “relief,” we daren’t set them to work
at murder. We have to get another solution.

Here is one, used for generations but still going fairly strong.
The murderer is found; oh, yes, he’s found all right and con-
fesses his guilt, but it is only too plain that his physical condition
is such that he must soon “go before a higher tribunal.” And that
doesn’t mean the supreme court.

It seems that at the moment when the Great Detective and
Inspector Higginbottom have seized him he has developed a
“hacking cough.” This is one of those terrible maladies known
only in fiction — like “brain fever” and a “broken heart,” for
which all medicine is in vain. Indeed in this case, as the man
starts to make his confession, he can hardly talk for hacks.

‘'Well/' said Garth, looking round at the little group of police
officers, “the game is up — hack! hack! — and I may as well make
a clean breast of it — hack, hack, hack."

Any trained reader when he hears these hacks knows exactly
what they are to lead up to. The criminal, robust though he
seemed only a chapter ago when he jumped through a three-
story window after throttling Sub-Inspector Juggins half to death,
is a dying man. He has got one of those terrible diseases known
to fiction as a “mortal complaint.” It wouldn’t do to give it an
exact name, or somebody might get busy and cure it. The symp-
toms are a hacking cough and a great mildness of manner, an ab-
sence of all profanity, and a tendency to call everybody “you gen-
tlemen.” Those things spell finis.

In fact, all that is needed now is for the Great Detective him-
self to say, “Gentlemen" (They are all gentlemen at this stage of

336 Stephen Leacock

the story.), ''a higher conviction than any earthly law has, et cet-
era, et cetera/* With that, the curtain is dropped, and it is under-
stood that the criminal made his exit the same night.

That’s better, decidedly better. And yet, lacking in cheerful-
ness, somehow.

In fact this solution has something a little cowardly about it.
It doesn’t face the music.

One more of these futile solutions may be offered. Here’s the
way it is done.

The Great Detective stood looking about him, quietly shaking
his head. His eye rested a moment on the prostrate body of Sub-
Inspector Bradshaw, then turned to scrutinize the neat hole drilled
in the glass of the window,

*T see it all now,** he murmured, 'L should have guessed it
sooner. There is no doubt whose work this is.**

^‘Who is itr* I asked.

''Blue Edward,** he announced quietly,

"Blue Edward!** I exclaimed.

"Blue Edward,** he repeated.

"Blue Edward!** I reiterated, "but who then is Blue Edward?**

This, of course, is the very question that the reader is wanting
to ask. Who on earth is Blue Edward? The question is answered
at once by the Great Detective himself.

"The fact that you have never heard of Blue Edward merely
shows the world that you have lived in. As a matter of fact, Blue
Edward is the terror of four continents. We have traced him to
Shanghai, only to find him in Madagascar. It was he who organ-
ized the terrible robbery at Irkutsk in which ten mujiks were
blown up with a bottle of Epsom salts.

"It was Blue Edward who for years held the whole of Phila-
delphia in abject terror, and kept Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on the
jump for even longer. At the head of a gang of criminals that
ramifies all over the known globe, equipped with a scientific edu-
cation that enables him to read and write and use a typewriter
with the greatest ease. Blue Edward has practically held the police
of the world at bay for years.

"I suspected his hand in this from the start. From the very out-
set, certain evidences pointed to the work of Blue Edward.**

Murder at $2.^0 a Crime 33^

After which all the police inspectors and spectators keep shak-
ing their heads and murmuring, “Blue Edward, Blue Edward,'"
until the reader is sufficiently impressed.

The fact is that the writer can*t end the story, not if it is suffi-
ciently complicated in the beginning. No possible ending satisfies
the case. Not even the glad news that the heroine sank into the
Poor Nut’s arms, never to leave them again, can relieve the situa-
tion. Not even the knowledge that they erected a handsome me-
morial to Sir Charles, or that the Great Detective played the saxo-
phone for a week can quite compensate us.

Everything Under Control
By Richard Armour

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOb do 000000000 0 0 d 0 0 0 olTo ooooooodooo dinrsir

One of the better known young American poets, Richard Armour
has demonstrated a special facility for topical verse. His poem be-
low appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for October
i8, 1941.

i? 0 0 0 0 p op 0 0 0 0 oj) 0 0 Q 0 p 0 (to q Q 0 0 0 op 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (to p 0 0 <toj> 9 0 0 0 0 0,

The publication of mystery novels will be strictly controlled in
Italy, because they are considered harmful to the minds of fascist
youth. — News Item.

In the land of Mussolini
They are viewing with alarm:

The authorities are spleeny
When they think how great the harm

To the dormant cerebrations
Of impressionable youths.

Should the ratiocinations
Of detective-story sleuths

Interfere, despite hoodwinking
Of the best fascistic kind.

And evoke a little thinking
In the regimented mind.

The Whistling Corpse
By Ben Hecht

0 0 ci ol» 0 00000000000000006006600 0 0 0 60000000000000000000^

Parody has long been recognized as one of the sharpest of all
forms of criticism. If the proponents of a certain variety of over-
ripe mystery fiction^ usually associated with the American women's
magazines^ can hold up their heads after reading this scathing
lampoon of their kind they are a hardy crew indeed. Like Ogden
Nash^ Mr. Hecht suggests by implication that the sorority con-
cerned had better mind their mannerisms and curtail their cliches
— or else! (A view shared by a wide and growing section of the
mystery-reading public.) Ben Hecht is a renowned American wit
and man-0 f -letters. His satire appeared in Ellery Queen*s Mystery
Magazine for September 1945.

j?Oj?OOOOOOOOOOflOOOOOOOO(iOOOOOOOpOOiltPQOOOOOOOpOJ^OJ)OOOQ^

(Author’s Note: I am indebted to the writers of mystery books
for many hours of diversion. In part payment of this debt I offer
them this Chapter One, gratis and unencumbered, to use as a be-
ginning for any of their subsequent works.)

Dedication

To Maybell, Gladys, Hortense, Marianne, Mathilda, Tinee,
Ginger, Ethyl, Gussykins, Helena, Chickie, Bernice, Eifi, Dorothea,
Gugu, Greta, My Wife and Mom, without whose love and tender
understanding and jolly evenings at Grapes End this book would
never have been written.

Author's Note

(The characters in this book bear no resmblance to anyone living
or dead with the exception of course, of Colonel Sparks and the
charming Eulalia. I have used their red bam as a scene for two of

Ben Hecht

340

the murders but Marroway Hall is entirely fictional and, as every-
one knows, there is no such state in the U.S.A. as Bonita.)

CHAPTER ONE

I SHALL never forget the bright summer afternoon when poor
Stuffy found the green button under Grandma Marnoy’s knitting
bag — on the lawn out there, a stone’s throw from Indian Creek
that bisects the rolling Marpleton grounds where Toppet, Ruby
and I used to play pirate and chase butterflies. I have often won-
dered what would have happened if Stuffy had given me the but-
ton instead of swallowing it. For one thing, Consuela Marston
would never have met the man with the pick ax and I would
never, of course, have gone to that dreadful carnival which was
the beginning of everything.

Had I known, of course, even after the button, what seems so
obvious to us all now — I mean, about Uncle Massie’s love for that
curious creature during his mining days in Texas when he
founded the great Micheljohn fortune — I might have prevented
some of the disasters which for a time threatened to wipe out the
descendants of Nathaniel Colby. But poor Madelaine had always
misunderstood Percival Massie’s reasons for selling the great coffee
warehouses that had been in the family — even before Jebby was
born.

Percival loved Madelaine — in his own way, of course — arrogant,
thin lipped and even sneeringly. But it was love as we all were
to discover when the green button came home to roost and poor
Stuffy was no more. That afternoon of the autopsy still brings
a chill into my bones. Poor Stuffy! How can I ever blot out the
memory of his bewildered face when the dead rose up and
whistled at him — that whistle that changed Marroway Hall into a
charnel house!

The events are still too fresh in my mind for me to write with-
out a shudder as I recall that summer afternoon when Loppy and
Coppy, Grandma Marnoy’s favorite twins, arrived on the 3:18
at Maskincott, in answer to her imperial summons. Marroway
Hall was never so festive as on that moment when these two ill-
fated youngsters came laughing down the baronial staircase that
led from Cousin Marshall’s secret laboratory — as we .were to find

The Whistling Corpse 341

out — straight into the old Colonial living room that had once
been a fort— the fort where the British had massacred the last
of the Green Mountain boys on that Sunday hundreds of years
ago before Bonita had yet become a state.

As children we used to be proud of the bloodstains over the
mantelpiece which neither old Jebby nor any of the staff was al-
lowed to efface. Little did we think that those bloodstains would
someday become the clue that would put a rope around the necks
of three people we all loved.

But, to return to the Green Button and poor Stuffy’s untimely
gourmandizing, I knew, of course, on that afternoon that Jennifer
and Siegfried Mersmer had left two sons at the time of their tragic
death in the south of France, although Delmar had disappeared
when he was twelve and Happy (as we called him) had inherited
the entire Marvin fortune, including the great stables of Marvin-
grovia. Word of Delmar’s marriage to the ill-fated Agatha had
been brought to us much later by Uncle Mooney when he re-
turned with faithful Jebby after settling his affairs in the Trans-
vaal. It was much too late for any of us to do anything, and I’m
afraid we did just that — ^nothing. We all knew, of course, that
the young wife had died in childbirth and that the twins Loppy
and Coppy belonged to a previous marriage. But none of us —
with the exception, of course, of the dead man who whistled
through those awful nights — ^had any inkling of Uncle More-
head’s last will and testament. But I am getting ahead of my story
a wee bit.

It all really begins with the finding of the green button. We
were all sitting on the veranda, the Countess Marsley, Spike Hum-
mer, catcher for the Giants, and Uncle Murchison’s two nephews
— Milton and the irrepressible Pliny. And Grandma Marnoy was
knitting away, laughing and agile despite her hundred and two
years. And poor ill-fated Cousin Mullineaux was poring over his
famous stamp collection. We sat sipping those adorable juleps
that only old Jebby knew how to make and listening to Joel, the
wittiest and yet cruellest man I have ever known, describe his
recent trip to Charlestown,

I detected a curious tightening of Aunt Molby’s eyelids as Joel
talked and, despite the languorous mood of that moment, I felt

Ben Hecht

34 «

a number of undercurrents. Jerry’s hatred of the lovely Marianne
and Uncle Milford’s twenty years of silent rage against the woman
who had left him for that impecunious art student — poor Jon
Mungo whose lovely portrait of Senorita X hangs before me even
now as I write — these were some of the undercurrents. There
were others that I was to learn of later.

But we were all gay and frightfully witty as we sat there, listen-
ing to the chatter of the twins and watching Stuffy playing pirate
on the lawn by himself. Suddenly something green flashed in the
Bonita sun. I remember hearing a sharp intake of breath behind
me, as if someone were stifling a gasp of terror. And then the flash
of green was gone. The green button had disappeared down Stuf-
fy’s throat.

I turned, wondering who had gasped, and looked into the blaz-
ing eyes of Cousin Maynard — lank, easy going Maynard with his
patrician nose and the ne’er-do-well droop to his sensual mouth.
A knowing chuckle came from Grandma Marnoy’s esoteric face!
And then we were all chatting gayly again. All but Madelaine.

Poor Loppy! Maynard’s love for her is something that still
brings a glow to me as I recall him whittling that first boomerang
— the one we found later at the bottom of Indian Creek, covered
with her blood. It lies before me on my desk as I write, together
with the green button, the cros§-bow, the little tom laundry list,
the pile of empty envelopes, and the old-fashioned fireless cooker
that were all to open our eyes before that awful summer in Bonita
was over.

I have always had a distaste for family reunions — and despite
my interest in Grandma Marnoy’s declaration that she had de-
cided to change her will, I felt bored. Which may explain why
I was the first to leave the veranda and why it was I, of all peo-
ple, who first saw the daintily shod pair of feet dangling over
the baronial staircase. For a moment I was too overcome to
scream! A woman, still beautiful, still voluptuous, hanging in our
ancient living room! I stared in horror at the lovely dead face
now contorted in agony. And I had barely time to realize that
this dangling corpse was whistling — whistling an old French-
Canadian nursery song — Arouet, ma' jollie Arouet — ^before the
room turned black and I felt myself plunging into an abyss.

Oh, England! Full of Sin
By Robert J. Casey

d 0 0 0 0 oir OOOOOOOOOdOOOOOOOOO'OOOOOOOifOO 0 0 0000000 ol) 000 flTo

Although ‘"Bob*' Casey is best known to the American reading
public as journalist^ traveler, and war correspondent, he also has
a respectable collection of mystery thrillers to his credit. He is
additionally an omnivorous reader of other peopWs whodunits,
as this lively survey of the curious tribal mores of the British
school [from Scribner's Magazine for April ip3y) will testify.

POOOQOOQ.OQOOO 0000 poo OOOQOOjaj)OOaj)QOOi>pO (tOOOOOOOpOpOpQ,

The English are a strange people who murder their grandmoth-
ers (named Lady Pamela) in hermetically sealed rooms. They pur-
sue a cozy communal existence in one-roomed houses called The
Library. They have no calendar; everything happens on a single
date — ^a fortnight come Michaelmas. They live in a constant fog,
surrounded by blighters, toffs, and outlanders who say ‘‘Waal"
and “I reckon." They play a bit of golf so that corpses can be
found on the thirteenth green. Occasionally they vary this and
go hunting on the downs or the moors — two benighted localities
where life is short and generally sinful.

One is told that in other times the English were divided into
three classes: upper, middle, and lower. But readers of English
detective stories know all that has been done away with. Through
the leveling influence of crime, everybody in England is now like
everybody else, with mystery in his soul, a past on his conscience,
and rubber heels on his feet — ^rubber heels that leave a peculiar
imprint in peculiar mud especially designed to receive peculiar
heelprints in Devonshire or Sussex or Shropshire,

Lady Pamela is never what she seems. Even when she plays her
favorite r61e as a corpse, there is something suspicious about her

344 Robert J. Casey

until the climax of all that is good in English life is reached —
Chapter XXXI (copyright, Hodder & Stoughton). The butler is
a missing heir or jewel thief, or perhaps only a wandering min-
strel from Australia who cherishes a secret sorrow. The second
maid is the child of Sir Roger Branksome by a former marriage
or by no marriage at all. She is gray-haired and silent and in-
scrutable, or young and wistful and frightened by the memory
of other murders that she saw done when she was in the service
of the Duke of Wuffenbaugh — the night the candles about Lady
Whosit's coffin set fire to the great hall. (That was twenty years
ago a fortnight come Michaelmas.)

Marriage exists as a legal institution in England^ — the old fam-
ily lawyer mentions that when all the relatives assemble, after
the current murder, for the reading of the will. But in the tired
eyes of the detectives, who warn everybody that anything they
say may be used in evidence against them, such conventions count
for little. The visitors at English country houses are uniformly
folks who can’t or won't tell where they were last night between
the third rubber of bridge and the time the shot was fired — say
five A.M. For that matter, they are very shy about talking of them-
selves at all. Most of the young women have been at Brighton
out of season, and the young men who don’t care who knows when
they were at Brighton or with whom are against cross-examination
on principle. They are afraid that somebody might find out about
that business in The City when Tancred’s Ltd. failed and old
Sir Oswald shot himself without respect for the familiar tradition
of the locked room.

It is perhaps fortunate for this interesting commonwealth that
the population is about evenly divided between murderers, victims,
and detectives — this gives everybody an even break. One might
think that so definite a classification would reduce life on the
Island to a strict routine through which the average citizen would
wander benighted, from birth to the coroner’s inquest, without
variety of occupation or hope for advancement. But that is not
true, because nobody can tell by looking at these three classes
of English gentlefolk just which one is which. Life can never be
staid or humdrum in a community where a detective may turn
out to be a murderer or a corpse, or, stranger still, a detective.

Ohj, England! Full of Sin 345

Each time the chauiBEeur loses his way in the rain (the windscreen
wipers working like fury against the thickening veil of beaded
gray); each time the pale-faced man in evening dress with a patch
over his right eye admits one to the silent company of men and
women clustered about the dying fire in the library; each time
these things happen there is a new thrill. They are always hap-
pening, of course, but their charm is unending.

The reason novelty springs eternal in such commonplace occur-
rences (which every Englishman has experienced thousands of
times, exclusive of reprints) is that the scene and characters re-
main the same, but the lines and motivation are always different.
One never knows, as he stands by the fireplace and checks up on
the oddly assorted company into which circumstance has thrust
him, whether he is scheduled to be the long-lost heir or, much to
his own surprise, an inspector from Scotland Yard, or merely an-
other victim for the old four-poster bed — the old four-poster bed
in the north wing which has claimed so many wet visitors since
old Malcolm got his throat cut there in the early hunting sea-
son of 1894. One doesn't ask, of course. If one is truly English,
one doesn't forget himself even to notice that the host with the
patch on his eye has a Spanish poniard sticking out of his back
some four and a half inches.

Trained on the playing fields of Eton, one doesn't so much as
lift an eyebrow when the tall, icy blonde at the end of the divan
adjusts her pearls and discloses three bullet holes (Lee-Enfield
service rifle, caliber .30). It wouldn't be cricket to observe that
the ormolu clock has just struck thirteen or that somewhere be-
yond the shadowy bend in the black oak staircase a mad woman
is screaming. In England, one doesn't call the cops until there is
real need for them. One just doesn't, that's all.

When one comes in out of the wet and claims the hospitality
of a host with a knife sticking out of his back, one knows what
to expect and how to act. That is part of one’s heritage as an Eng-
lishman. One explains that he can go no farther because the wind-
screen wiper isn't working properly and that he is sorry to cause
inconvenience. Then he offers cigarettes to such of the assemblage
as happen to be alive and thoughtfully watches the steam rising
from his sodden boots. It is permitted him under the rules of

346 Robert /. Casey

etiquette to observe out of the corner of his eye some of the
people who glare at him balefully through the dizzy reflections
of the fire — the hard-faced young man in the aviator*s costume,
the suave graybeard beside the icy blonde (one knows him in-
stantly for a retired colonel recently arrived from India), the beau-
tiful ingenue who tries to smile as she tears her lace handkerchief
to shreds with pale, nervous hands, the apoplectic draper from
Manchester, the Malay servant with the mark of the kris across
his villainous jaw — one notes them all and files them away in
his retentive memory, aware that he will see them all again —
in the dock. Then one carries on.

These jolly evenings in England, almost as much of a national
institution as cricket, have, it is true, been criticized. Since the
War no conventions of conduct, amusement, or social relation-
ship have survived in quite their original form. Some of the
younger generation prefer to have their murders done in night
clubs or among the sprightly Chinese of Whitechapel. But one
who knows the stability of English thought, the inflexibility of
English ideals, the deep-rooted love of England for the things
that time has proved worthwhile, must realize that the finding
of mysterious houses on rainy nights will never lose its popularity.

One may feel that he has met all of the patch-eyed host’s friends
before, as indeed he has, on other bad nights when the windscreen
wiper failed to work and the spark plugs got wet. But he is always
cheered by the thought that he never can tell in advance what
the current purpose of the conclave may be. Perhaps Old Patch-
eye (Doctor Zingara Pachi, as he is sometimes called) may be plot-
ting the overthrow of Downing Street or the spread of anthrax
through shaving brushes; perhaps he has called the clan to write
confessions of murder, arson, or misdemeanor on the backs of
£50,000 notes; perhaps he is merely breeding monsters in his
basement. The uncertainty of it all is what gives English country
life its zest.

When one is tempted to be bored on discovering the same old
faces in the same old library, he is permitted to cast a second
glance about the company and try to settle in his own mind which
one will turn out to be Superintendent Muggs of Scotland Yard.
One stares moodily into the fireplace and remembers that Su-

.Oh^ England! Full of Sin 347

perintendent Muggs is one of the Big Five, perhaps all of the Big
Five, Normally he can be found raising prize fowl somewhere
around Wembley or pottering about among his roses at Ealing
Broadway. On any one of his numerous vacations he can be found
salmon fishing in some locality where the murders occur most
unexpectedly and in the greatest numbers. On such a night as
this, however, he is certain to be the five fellows whose spark plugs
got wet just ahead of yours.

Unless you die before you wake, youll find out all about it in
the morning. You’ll look through your window on a dew-pearled
countryside where the greenery steps down through the lace of
the yew trees toward the sunny opalescence of the distant sea.
And youll observe Superintendent Muggs gratefully accepting his
prisoner from the hands of Horace, the second groom, who was
wise enough to know who was guilty before the murder was com-
mitted.

Of course, in the meantime, the criminal may have confessed.
Confession is a habit of English murderers — 3. habit that makes
them sui generis and wins for them the love of countries where
lawbreakers are less thoughtful. There can be no perfect crime
in England so long as English killers remain true to the tradi-
tions of their craft and tell all any time the detectives find them-
selves all muddled up with footprints, fingerprints, suicide notes,
and drippings from umbrellas.

It must not be supposed that all of the big detectives in Eng-
land are Superintendent Muggs of the Big Five. Scotland Yard,
for the most part, is composed of bright young men trained to
listen to explanations of how the crime was committed. They are
skilled in advancing theories. Since the days of the late Sherlock
Holmes they have been able to distinguish the difference be-
tween heat and cold and the quick and the dead. With the years,
they have cultivated an abiding calm that makes their decisions
on such subjects important. But they never relinquish their Eng-
lish citizenship or their English prerogative of committing an oc-
casional murder themselves or letting themselves be found cold
and stiff in the customary locked room.

Your real detective is quite likely to be a doctor — an ancient
specialist in tonsillectomy — ^who is interested in finding: out whv

348 Robert J. Casey

some people kill other people. Or he may be a barrister, or a play-
wright, or Sir Henry himself, or perhaps the vicar. One great
English detective was, in fact, a retired French detective, so you
see how difficult it is to judge, how useless to guess. In a country
where your physician may turn out to be a secret agent for the
Polynesian Poi League and your chemist may one day stand re-
vealed as the King of Sweden, such things cease to matter.

In point of fact it is no great task to be a detective in England.
For, to be explicit, no true British murderer ever ended his work
with the provision of a cadaver. Always he leaves those little marks
of his individuality which make the crime worth eight shillings
between hard covers. If he is an amateur, he may leave only a
set of fingerprints — ^his own and quite a lot of those of his friends
and relatives. If he is skillful but in a hurry, he may leave only
meager exhibits of Devonshire mud and stubs of rare old Gold
Flyke cigarettes.

In well-contrived murders, he leaves his hat, ladder marks un-
der the window, buttons on the floor of the sealed room, railroad-
ticket stubs, samples of his hair, army discharge papers, fingernail
clippings, footprints, handprints, Bertillon measurements, and
letters from his mother. In the United States, criminals don’t do
that, and the percentage of escapes is correspondingly higher. In
England, it is customary to ask some innocent bystander to as-
sume sponsorship for the exhibits, but when he fails to cooperate,
the guilty man or woman is duly notified, and there’s an end to it.

Apparently there are no law courts in England, because the
murderers all commit suicide in picturesque fashion as soon as
the evidence is completed. This simplification of the legal pro-
cedure alone saved Great Britain countless pounds during the
recent depression, although it had the effect of putting numerous
magistrates and barristers out of work.

English railway-station employees are the greatest memory ex-
perts in the world. They are given close competition for this dis-
tinction by the taxicab drivers, inasmuch as either of them can
remember the age, weight, complexion, dress, and distinguish-
ing marks of anybody who checked his aunt’s body on the up
goods train from Kings Cross a fortnight come Michaelmas, How-
ever, the birthday-honors list favors the engine drivers, guards^

Oh) England! Full of Sin 349

and station attendants who can remember not only the shipper
of the clinical material, but the punch marks in his ticket from
Twiddergglellyn (pronounced Chumley), Wales. This gift has
been invaluable to the police who, after interviewing them, have
only to consult the roster of people with missing aunts in Twid-
dergglellyn and thus arrive at a rough idea of what is going on.

Off duty, the taxi drivers live in places called pubs which are
opposite other places called the mews. These pubs have historic
significance, particularly in London, There they were once the
haunt of five Hindus freshly arrived in search of the idoFs eye.
In those colorful days people were sometimes killed in pubs and
tossed into the river, later to be identified by laundry marks and
restored to families who had friends or business acquaintances in
Baker Street. Now, aside from their function as resting places for
taxi-driving experts in mnemonics, they serve no useful purpose,
save as an occasional rendezvous for the Big Ben Listeners’ Club,
whose members always hear Big Ben strike just as the innocent
suspect comes out of the fog with blood on his shoes.

London life, of necessity, differs in setting if not in tempo from
that of the country. The city itself is a gray and mysterious place
whose streets have not been mapped since Doctor Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. Its dank lanes, around the corner from the pub and mews,
have never been plumbed, its thick fogs are filled with lost pedes-
trians, lorries, trams, hansom cabs, and screams.

Living in London has been amazingly simplified since the con-
centration of populace which began some time before the War.
In the days when avenging angels from Utah were wandering
about, painting cabalistic signs on doors, they had a lot of trouble.
There were so many people who lived in houses, and consequently
so many doors. London must have had quite an area in those
days. The patient Hindus who came looking for moonstones trot-
ted for hundreds of miles over rough cobbles without getting a
glimpse of it, and presumably had to be relieved by fresh batches
of Hindus working in relays. Even at the turn of the century, a
policeman’s lot was not a happy one because so many families
occupied individual houses or flats, or bed sitting rooms — a habit
due no doubt to British reserve, which is cultivated on the play-
ing fields of Eton.

350 Robert J, Casey

Now, however, things are different If a murder is committed
on the embankment or in the hermetically sealed room, or in the
pantry or vestry of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Scotland Yard has an
easy task. The whole population is immediately questioned — ^after
first being warned that anything the populace says may be used
in evidence against it. And this is simple because everybody lives
in the Adelphi apartments in Maida Vale. Of course, there are
a few exceptions. All doctors live in Harley Street. All barristers
live in Lincoln’s Inn. All Italians live in Soho.

Aside from the several million citizens whose names are over
the doorbells, several unidentified but interesting people inhabit
the Adelphi. There is the old man who plays the Moonlight Sonata
on the violin every morning at two o’clock. His name has not yet
been learned because nobody wishes to intrude on his privacy.
It seems more than likely that he is a murderer and a very good
one. He couldn’t very well be the corpse.

Then there is the woman in black who comes in through the
windows of the bed sitting room at midnight when the gale is
howling outside and the fire is crackling cozily in the grate. You
are sitting in front of the fire with a good book and a mug of
mulled sack — ^you a handsome bachelor who cannot imagine why
somebody took three shots at you with arrows dipped in henbane
tonight as you were leaving your ofiice in the Admiralty. You feel
a draft on the back of your neck and you turn around just in
time to see this voluptuous blonde (cloaked in black velvet with
a collar of astrakhan) float into the room from behind the cur-
tains. Sometimes she is clutching a gun, sometimes her heart
There is a wild look in her eyes. She is biting her lips. She is trem-
bling — exhausted — desperate. And there is a little something
about her that reminds you of wind in the heather. (That is a
little more difficult to explain than the lady’s presence in your
apartment, but wind in the heather is what she reminds you of.)
So, even if she hasn’t a gun, you arise with a full supply of that
reserve which you acquired on the playing fields of Eton, and
you say: ‘‘Stupid of me not to have heard you ring. Please sit
down and let me chase Jasper [or AH or Ganeshi Lai] for another
cup of sack. ... Or perhaps you would prefer a noggin of
gin?”

After you have met the woman in black, night after night—

Oh^ England! Full of Sin 351 .

always under the most decorous circumstances, however uncon-
ventional they may seem to the lift operator — you perform these
rites almost automatically. But you never tire of the situation.
You never think of turning the hounds loose on the authors who
have been chasing this girl through the stormy night for the last
three decades. After all, one must do something with one’s eve-
nings. You take the whole business as a matter of course, and
the young woman dries herself on her own specially embroidered
guest towel and lolls about kittenlike in your great big over-
stuffed pyjamas. She comes, in time, to trust you — as who
wouldn’t?

Tomorrow morning you will find out that she is somebddy
— Little Lotus Flower from the East India Docks, or Queen
Marie, or the Lady That’s Known as Lou. But whatever happens,
you know that she isn’t going to be a murderess — at any rate she
never has been up to now. She has taken the better part. She is
the lovely voice that one will hear forever in the sighing of the
wind, the beautiful face that one will see eternally in the fire.
She is the reason Adelphi tenants learned to sleep with their win-
dows open — especially windows leading to fire escapes.

Considering the tremendous number of crimes occurring in
London, the longevity of its citizens is remarkable. It is impos-
sible from this distance (say 3000 miles) to conduct an adequate
research into the causes, but a study of reports may give us a
clue. People have to stay alive because of the unsettled condi-
tions of the graveyards and the overproduction of cadavers. Such
corpses as do find their way into graves are always dug up in a
day or two. The London Underground could have been sunk five
times over through the exhumation processes of the detective-
story writers. Other products of violent crime are not buried at
all, but are checked at Waterloo or Victoria stations until called
for — ^making for congestion at these points that is truly deplora-
ble.

It is difiicult to die in England, no matter who breaks into your
apartment with pistols, deadly gases, poisoned darts. Mills bombs,
or copies of The London Times, In fact, the published records
contain no mention of a death from natural causes since the
demise of Wilkie Collins, and there seems to be some doubt about
him. Apparently if you don’t get murdered, you live forever.

Murders and Motives
By E. V. Lucas

0 0 oli 0 0 0 OOOOOOOOOOOOdOOOOtfOOOOOOOOOO (To 0 0'5 0 0 0 0

Edward Verrall Lucas (i868-ip^8) was one of the most finished
present‘day English practitioners of that gentle and welhnigh lost
artj the familiar essay. The amusing fancy printed here is from
his A Fronded Isle and Other Essays {London: Methuen^ ip2y;
New York: Doubleday, 1^28),

pooo_ooooooooop9oooooooopoj)ooo_oopooopooo,ooooooooopooo.

We were talking about the woful condition of country-house
parties when the weather is bad and conversation flags. For if it
has been too wet for golf, how can a man relate the misadventures
that beset him at the fifth hole or his triumphs at the seventh?
Bridge, of course, is useful between meals, but at meals there can
be serious silences, particularly among those whose luck is out.

*Let me tell you,* said little Mrs. ffolliott, *of a scheme that I
invented. You may all have it if you like. It*s perfect. Last year
we had a party in Scotland and it rained all the time, as one might
have expected. Indeed, as I did expect, and that is why I took
such pains to make it a success.*

She paused to give someone the opportunity of saying earnestly,
‘Bo tell us;

As a matter of fact we all said it.

Little Mrs. ffolliott composed herself happily to hold the floor.

"Just before leaving for Scotland,* she said, ‘I went to the book-
sellers* and asked what was the very latest detective novel. They
showed me several old ones. “No,** I said, “I don*t mean these;
I have read these. I want one that was published yesterday or
won*t be published till to-morrow — absolutely new;** and at last
they found one. It was not to be on sale till two days later, but

352

Murders and Motives

353

they let me have a dozen copies. I remember the title and the
author perfectly, although it was last year; The Mystery of Grew-
sam Grange^ by Avery Cross Traylor/

IVe read that,' said half a dozen voices at once.

'Of course you have,’ said Mrs. jffolliott, 'but the point is that
no one had read it then/

‘Isn’t that the story,’ asked the bishop, ‘in which the murderer
turns out to be the maiden aunt?’

'That’s the one!’ we exclaimed.

'It seemed to me,’ said the bishop, 'highly improbable: more
than improbable, unfair. There was no motive, and a motive
there must be. My theory is that murderers should be murderers,
whereas this estimable lady would never have hurt a fly. I doubt
if it is playing the game to make the guilty person a fundamen-
tally innocuous one like that, just to put readers off the scent.’

‘True,’ said Mrs. ffolliott, who was getting a little restive under
this interruption, 'but if readers weren’t put off the scent there
would be very little in my scheme, and that's why The Mystery
of Grewsam Grange was so useful. You see, this is what I did:
I had those twelve copies cut up into chapters, and each chapter
separately bound and lettered; and, having discovered that none
of my guests had read the book — except one meek little man, and

I swore him to secrecy — I distributed Chapter I on the day of
their arrival, with injunctions that it was to be read before din-
ner* Read; no skipping. What was the result? As they all had
the same absorbing topic of conversation, dinner was one long
and successful clash or harmony of theories as to the probable
course of events.’

Mrs. ffolliott paused for praise and got it.

'When they went to bed,’ she continued, ‘they found Chapter

II in their rooms. And so on through the week; the sections were
carefully distributed. I kept them myself under lock and key, and
such was the excitement that I had to hide the key for fear of
theft. The man who had read the story in London was so pestered
for private information that he arranged for a telegram to be
sent to himself and left. Everybody joined in; even Percy, who
has never been known to read anything but The Times, But,’
added little Mrs. ffolliott, 'it’s astonishing how, when you come

E. V. Lucas

354

to detective stories, the dullest men, City men, shooting men,
even hunting men, can display literary taste/

A murmur of doubt, led by the bishop, ran round the company.
'Well, at any rate,* Mrs. ffolliott amended, 'curiosity concern-
ing the printed word.*

'Better,* said the bishop approvingly.

'You never heard such a rattle as we used to have at lunch and
dinner,* Mrs. ffolliott resumed; 'and I don*t know what the serv-
vants would have thought if they had not known about it, for
there was nothing but murders and motives all the time. But as
a matter of fact the butler was playing too, for it seems that my
maid gave him one of the extra copies.*

'Did many of your guests guess the guilty party?’ the bishop
inquired.

'Oh, yes; two or three. But only, I think, out of perversity.
They agreed with you,* said little Mrs. ffolliott, 'that to make it
the maiden aunt was not quite the thing.*

'Indeed no,* said the bishop, 'most reprehensible.*

'I was sorry for the little man who had to leave,* Mrs. ffolliott
went on. 'The perfect way, of course, would be to get one of the
swell authors to write one a special story — Conan Doyle or Austin
Freeman or J. W. Crofts or Edgar Wallace or Father Knox or
Mrs. Christie — and then there would be no possible chance of
•anyone knowing the end. But only a millionaire could do that.*
'No need to buy the work completely,* I suggested. 'You could
acquire merely the country-house rights.*

'I didn’t know there were such things,* said Mrs. ffolliott.
'Nor I,* I replied; 'but I don*t see why there shouldn’t be. It
would be an additional source of income for necessitous novelists.*
The bishop rose- 'I am afraid I must be going,’ he said. ‘Of
course you all know the earliest form of detective story? No? You
will find it in the Apocrypha — the story of Susanna and the El-
ders; its hero, Daniel, was the first detective.*

Murder on Parnassus
By Pierre Very

oooooooboooobooo^ooool)^ 0 0 00000000000060000 0 0<$ 0 00 OlRRr

In his native France^ M. Very is considered second only to Georges
Simenon among detective story writers {though, unlike Simenon’s,
none of his police romances has yet been translated into English),
His delightful and typically Gallic commentary on the craft which
follows appeared in the Parisian topical weekly Marianne and
was subsequently reprinted in translation in Living Age for April
^ 935 -

0 0 QP op 0 0 0 0^)1 0i> 0j> 0 0 0 p 0 0 0 0 Oj? Oi) Oj) 0 0 0 0.OJLftJULfiJUUUjlJl

Tupil Lacroix, tell me what you know about Mile Stangerson’s
secret?'

‘Mile Stangerson's secret? Well . . . that is, the secret of Mile
Stangerson . . /

1 see you don't know the first thing about it. Never mind.
Quote the famous sentence Rouletabille heard in the £lys^e gar-
dens beside the wall that borders the Avenue Marigny.'

< 9

# * • •

‘I see that you have not opened your Gaston Leroux. You will
copy the following sentence thirty times: '*Le presbytere n' a rien
perdu de son charme ni le jardin de son eclat** You may sit down/

Tupil Mercier, what do you know about Mile Stangerson's
secret/

‘Sir, Mile Stangerson secretly married a certain John Russell
in Philadelphia. He was none other than the sinister bandit Ball-
meyer, alias Detective Fr^d^ric Larsan, also known as Big Fred,
and she bore him a son, who was first called Joseph Jos^phin and
then Joseph Rouletabille/

‘Very good. What was the first material clue that Joseph Roule-
tabille discovered in the Chambre JauneT

356 Pierre Viry

‘A woman’s blond hair, sir/

‘Thank you/

‘Pupil Jozont, name Sherlock Holmes’s most mortal enemy/

‘Professor Moriarty/

‘What was the date of the murder of the widow Lerouge in
the Affaire Lerouge written by Gaboriau?’

‘March 4, 1862/

‘Thank you. Pupil Gharantec, tell me about Isidore Bautrelet/

‘Isidore Bautrelet, the schoolboy in the adventure of the Ai-
guille creusej was Arstee Lupin’s formidable adversary. He knew
that the corpse found on the cliff . .

This scene takes place in a French lyc^e about 2935. Criminal
literature, which was incorporated in the school curriculum about
2500, has little by little taken precedence over all other forms
of literature, which have become discredited and forgotten. Edgar
Allan Poe, Edgar Wallace, and certain highly specialized authors
who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century have become
classics, whom the pupils study from the time they are twelve
or thirteen years old until they graduate.

It begins early in the morning with dictation: ‘At exactly six
o’clock, as he had announced, Herlock Sholmfes, wearing a pair
of trousers that were too short and a coat that was too narrrow,
both of which he had borrowed from an innkeeper . .

An exercise in grammar follows: ‘The policeman took the old
judge by the arm and squeezed him energetically . .

Then comes a translation, ‘Open your Meurtre de Roger Ack-
royd at page 269, chapter 23: Poirot’s little party — from “and
now, said Caroline, rising, that child is coming upstairs to lie
down,” until, “what is it? I asked.” ’

And so it goes until noon. At home the children ask their par-
ents strange questions. ‘Mother,’ says the eldest girl at the table,
fencing with her beefsteak, ‘suppose that you want to poison
father/

‘Yes/ says the mother,

‘You have nothing but arsenic at your disposal.’

Murder on Parnassus

357

'Veay well/

'What food would you put the poison into so that father could
not tell by the taste?*

The father looks up and waits for the answer.

'Well/ says the mother, 'I think that good strong coffee would
do the trick.*

‘Good Lord, no,* the father cries, 'that wouldn’t do at all, my
dear. I could tell right away. If I were you, Fd wait until the
cold weather came because then I get my attacks of acidity and
take malt. Well, you put your arsenic in my malt . . .*

The pupils return to school. The professor draws figures and
numbers on the blackboard. This is the geometry class. 'Given a
closed space in the form of an isosceles triangle, ABC, and another
closed space Z in the form of a hexagon MNOPQR. Find . . .*

And a physics class. 'If you have a safe covered with armored
plate X millimetres thick and a blow-torch whose power is 5, find
the time necessary to make around the lock a circular aperture
having a diameter of . . /

At last the recreation period. The pupils form groups and chat
while they walk around the courtyard. ‘Say, you! How do you say
in English pas une dmef

'I think it’s "nobody/* Why?’

'I need it for my lesson. The professor gave us some Gallet
decide to translate: Pas une dme pour egayer le decor et ren-
seigner le voyageur, etc.'

Another pupil asks, ‘Who did you say was the criminal in the
last induction and logic problem?*

‘Why, the school inspector, of course/

'Oh, no, he isn’t the criminal. It’s the detective. The cigarette
butt shows that.*

'Not at all,* says a third. 'The whole trick depends on the alibi.
In the beginning the victim was working hand in glove with the
murderer.*

In a hangar a group are standing around a physical education
instructor. 'The exercise consists in climbing up to a window two
yards above the ground without leaving any traces. Since the wall
is stuccoed, the exet'cise is done in four beats. The first position,
rise on the toes, hands on hips, chest back . . /

358 Pierre Very

We are again in the classroom. Philosophy is the subject. 'Gen-
tlemen, the emotions in Arsene Lupin . .

Latin class: 1 give you the old proverb, Is fecit cui prodest . . J

Zoology class: 'Gentlemen, "hotel rat” means . .

Literature class: 'Gentlemen, the triangle in literature is rep-
resented by three main characters — the victim, the murderer, and
the detective. We have as many as thirty-two dramatic situa-
tions . .

Evening at home: ‘Mother, imagine that you have killed your
lover with a sickle.’

'Very well.’

'You want to escape justice. In what store would you buy your
clothes? Would you wear a wig? Would you leave Paris on foot,
on a bicycle, in a taxi, and by which door. Would you take a
train? If so, at what station, and what would your destination be?’

'Father, imagine a corridor that has seven doors. A millionaire
is sleeping in the last room. His door and his window are locked
from within. His secretary is on watch in the next room. How
would you go about entering the millionaire’s room, murdering
him, robbing him, and getting away without leaving any clues?*

The father meditates for a moment and makes a gesture of an-
noyance. 'That’s childish, my boy. That’s the old problem of the
enclosed space. There are a lot of solutions. Theoretically, I can
use the inexplicable-gallery trick, or I can have recourse to the
funereal-odor system. Or, better yet — ^but what do you want me
to tell you? I knew my enclosed space by heart once upon a time,
but it’s been so long since I’ve looked at a book. Go ask your
big brother . . .*

Ill

The children sweat blood over these problems. Wearily they
drag their schoolbooks filled with such repulsive titles as UEtrange
mort de Sir Jeroboam Backdrive, Triple assassinat rue Sebastien^
Bottiuj U Affaire des oreillers rouges.

Mortal, stifling boredom emanates from these schoolbooks, from
these texts that have become colder than the corpses they deal
with since they have been made into a school subject to be dis-

Murder on Parnassus

359

sected and discussed. Long ago schoolboys stopped reading ad-
venture stories for the pleasure of it. They have stopped dream-
ing of themselves as gangsters and gentlemen robbers. They read
forbidden books and delight in a bizarre, vanguard literature in
which revolutionary authors resolutely break the old formulas
and compose strange works that they call tragedies and that are
generally written in Alexandrine verse.

Extravagant and sentimental conflicts are depicted. The van-
guard authors have invented a new triangle — the husband, the
wife, and the lover. A Spanish prince asks himself whether his
prime loyalty belongs to his father or to his mistress. An old man
drily watches a fratricidal war between his three sons and their
brothers-in-law, and there is the story of an incestuous queen
burning with passion for her chaste son-in-law. Young people also
enjoy those short narratives in irregular verse called fables, which
describe animals — the fox, the stork, the little rabbit, the ant,
and the grasshopper.

Of course, the professors scorn such frivolous works, but in
small chapels, in secret meetings, it is whispered that these de-
spised 'tragedies,* which are so disconcerting by their extreme
novelty, may some day become classics.

In which professional critics and reviewers hold the floor.

The Life of Riley
By Isaac Anderson

I3 00000000000000000ci00000 0 0 0'0 000000&000000h 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 0 0

For more years than they can remember, a goodly number of
American whodunit devotees have been looking to the pains-
taking and eminently fair reviews by Isaac Anderson in the New
York Times Book Review to tell them which mysteries to read
and which to pass by, Mr. Anderson, long a member of the Times
staff, here looks back on his career of crime (reviewing) with af-
fection and gentle satire,

SlslP ooooooopooooQOj?oooooooooj?oo 0 0 0 0 0 i> 0 00,0 Q 0 0 Q^O 0 0 0 0 apA

This man Riley may well have been a reviewer of detective
stories with nothing to do all day and every day but to read about
the fascinating subject of murder. That would explain why his
name has become a symbol of the happy life. Imagine him open-
ing the latest thriller, not yet on sale at the bookstores, and gloat-
ing over the gory details set forth in its pages. Presently the
corpse is discovered. It may be that of the white-haired old finan-
cier and philanthropist slumped over the desk in his library with
the hilt of an oriental dagger protruding from his back. Or it
may be that of a nameless vagabond done to death with a blunt
instrument and left lying at the bottom of the old stone quarry.
It may even be that of a beautiful young woman who was on the
morrow to have married the heir to a dukedom. In any case it
is a corpse, and the story is well under way.

Enter the detective. Perhaps he is a derby-hatted, cigar-smoking
member of the Homicide Squad, followed by a retinue consist-
ing of the bored Medical Examiner and the equally bored pho-
tographers and finger-print men. If there is a brash young re-
porter lurking in the background or, more likely, pushing his way
to the front, keep your eye on him. He is going to beat the police

363

Isaac Anderson

364

to the solution of the crime, thereby earning a fat bonus from his
publisher and establishing himself as the ace of aces among crime
reporters.

Sometimes a private investigator appears on the scene, called
in either because the family of the victim has no faith in the police
or because there is some deep, dark secret in the past which must
at all costs be prevented from coming to light. The first step
taken by this private eye, as he is sometimes called, is in the
direction of the nearest supply of liquor. He has learned by long
experience that his brain functions best when he is stewed to the
gills or when he has a hangover, and he makes it a point to be in
top form all of the time. The official police, who are not permit-
ted to drink while on duty, are jealous of this man and do all
they can to impede his efforts and to rob him of all credit when
his work is successful. The private dick is not dismayed. He can
be as tough as anybody else, and tougher. His ability to absorb
punishment is exceeded only by his ability to dish it out.

Riley’s favorite detective is the brilliant amateur. There is a
guy who knows all the answers. He has no official standing what-
ever, but that doesn’t matter. The police are compelled to re-
spect him because of his vast knowledge of everything under the
sun from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the batting averages of the
Brooklyn Dodgers. He listens patiently while Inspector Whoozis
demonstrates beyond the possibility of a doubt that the butler
bumped off the old gentleman in the library. He admits cheer-
fully that the butler had ample opportunity, that he had access
to the lethal weapon and that he had good reason to hate his
employer. But the brilliant amateur knows that the butler did
not do the killing. Butlers don’t do such things. It would be con-
trary to all the conventions of detective fiction. The brilliant ama-
teur knows that the only person who could have done the foul
deed is the person who has a perfectly sound alibi and who hasn’t
the shadow of a motive, so far as anyone knows. What is more,
the brilliant amateur proves it. How does he do it? That is a
secret not to be disclosed until the last chapter, and not always
then.

The one thing common to all detective heroes, as distinguished
from the bunglers who muddle things up for them, is that they

The Life of Riley 365

always get their man — or woman or child. And this brings us to
the subject o£ clues, those jigsaw pieces which the reader tries,
usually in vain, to fit together for himself before the author an-
nounces the solution in the last chapter. Now the more difficult
a puzzle is the better the addict likes it, and the author of a de-
tective story tries to make it as difficult as he can without violating
the cardinal principle of his craft, which is that all clues, like the
incriminating letter in Poe*s tale of “The Purloined Letter,”
must be in plain sight for those who have the eyes to see. He
does this in part by providing more puzzle pieces than there are
places to put them, in part by so placing the vital clues that they
blend with their surroundings in such a way that only the eye
of his superlatively perceptive hero is able to distinguish the real
clues from the phony ones and to recognize them for what they
are.

It is astonishing how many authors there are who are able to
bamboozle their readers in this way. Even Riley, who has read
and reviewed thousands of mysteries, is frequently fooled, per-
haps quite as frequently as anyone else. Indeed, he is disappointed
when he is able to guess the solution too early, for a mystery
which can be guessed is no mystery at all.

As Riley reads book after book in his chosen field, he notes,
perhaps with alarm, perhaps with perverse satisfaction, that the
language employed is nothing like that of the dime novel detec-
tive stories of his boyhood days — “Old Cap Collier,” “Old Sleuth”
and the rest. There wasn’t a “hell” or a “damn” in a carload of
those forbidden books. The detectives in the stories of our day
have bigger and worse expletives than these, and they speak freely
of things which Old Cap Collier would have blushed to mention.
“Hell” and “damn” are mere conversational small change, just
as they are in what used to be called polite society. Ah well! Times
change, and what the — I mean, what are you going to do about it?

But Riley, who occasionally reads so-called “straight” novels
just to see how the other half lives, knows that their language is
no better than that of the whodunits, while the plots, in his opin-
ion, are far worse. They deal far too often with love, which may
be evanescent, while murder, on the other hand, is as permanent
as anything can be. A man or woman in love may fall out of 1 # ve,

Ismc Anderson

366

but a corpse remains a corpse for all time. The writer who deals
with murder has one character who is going to stay put, no mat-
ter what the others may do.

This, then, is the kind of literature we mystery reviewers arc
privileged to read. No doubt there are some carping critics who
will question my use of the word ‘literature’’ in this connection,
but if the detective story is not literature, what is it? It is not al-
ways great literature, I grant you, but how many of the thousands
of books published every year deserve to be called great? Or lit-
erature? How many characters in modem fiction will be remem-
bered as long as Sherlock Holmes, for example? Call it what you
will, this is the sort of stuff we read and like. If we didn’t like it
we couldn’t go on reviewing it year after year without becoming
victims to mental indigestion.

Best of all — ^and this is where we have it all over the general
reader who must buy, borrow or steal his whodunits — ^we are
paid for reading them. Not enough to put us in the higher in-
come brackets, it is true, but look at the fun we have.

Battle of the Sexes: The Judge and His Wife
Look at Mysteries
By Judge Lynch"’

0 00000001)00 01) 0000000 00 0660 000 oinnrBTnnnriro 5 0 0 0 0 0 00 0 h 0

Pseudonymous '‘Judge Lynch'' is chief critic of whodunits for the
Saturday Review of Literature and is the principal originator of
the succinct tabular form of mystery review featured by that pub-
lication and widely copied elsewhere. A journalist and publisher,
the “Judge" has been reviewing mystery fiction for various Amer-
ican magazines and newspapers since the early x^io's. He dis-
cusses here a hitherto neglected aspect of the subject — the dif-
ferences between the genders in mystery preferences and appre-
ciation,

i)000000QQ0000Q 00 00000000000 OOP 00 0000 OJi OOOOOOOOQpt^

The following is written in self-defence.

Whenever the Judge takes home a batch of new mystery stories,
he is greeted with small feminine cries of delight and calls of
'"Gimme! Gimme!” So he gimmes, keeping out one for his own
evening stint. There was a time when he would have selected any
one, but he has long since learned that the longest, most leisurely,
stodgiest English mystery is the one for him to choose — ^until the
commotion subsides. Otherwise, he could not dodge the books
that are quite likely to hurtle across the room accompanied by
angry shrieks. Even when the initial disturbance is past and the
Judge*s wife settles down with a story that appears to meet her
requirements, the Judge is not yet in the Safety Zone. He can
never tell when the book will be closed with a snap, a scornful
voice will say, 'Toohl What nasty people! Who cares about what
they do or what happens to them!” And then — wham!

This has gone on long enough.

367

368 "'Judge Lynch''

So the Judge has decided to set down, for his bodily safety and
peace of mind, just what — he thinks — it is that women like, and
what they don’t like, in mystery stories. He knows full well that
women have always read mystery stories and that more women
are reading them today than ever before. He has learned, some-
what to his surprise, that their tastes differ from men’s in various
ways, so that it is unwise to make sweeping assertions about the
goodness or badness of any given mystery story. Obviously, we
cannot label mystery stories ‘Tor Men Only” and “For Woman
Only.” You can’t cut the distinction that clear. Indeed, the Judge
has found that most men like most mystery stories that most
women like — ^but most women don’t like some mysteries that most
men like — not by a long shot. Let’s get the whole thing clear, if pos-
sible, and, since clarity begins at home, here goes. . . .

“The people must be nice.” Not nice in the prissy or Sunday-
school sense, but, in the main, the kind of people that could be
in your circle of friends or that you wouldn’t mind adding to
your acquaintances, the kind of people that you’re really con-
cerned about as the story unrolls. They don’t necessarily have
to be paragons of virtue, but they must be interesting and believ-
able. Detectives (male) who drink six quarts of Bourbon before
breakfast and indulge in boudoir badinage with a bevy of blondes
are out. Likewise, the detective (female) who weighs three hun-
dred pounds, laps up likker, smokes cigars, and swears like a
trooper. Women don’t like their own sex tough — in mystery
stories. They like Mrs. Latham, although they are a bit derisive
over her endless pursuit of Col. Primrose; they enjoy Pamela
North, except that some of them think poor Pam has borne the
brunt of too many last-chapter nick-of-time rescues; they approve
of Miss Marple and Miss Silver — ^but do not agree with the Judge
that Hildegarde Withers is about the only bearable spinster sleuth
in the field. They would love to see Craig Rice do something
more with Mrs. Bill Smith (n^e Marion Carstairs) and the kids
who made Home Sweet Homicide so delightful — ^but most of
them don’t give too many hoots about Jake and Helene Justus
and lawyer Malone. (The Judge disagrees.)

They like “psychological” mysteries. In such stories they will
even tolerate nasty people — Doris Miles Disney’s Dark Road for

Battle of the Sexes 369

instance; but they like them better when a leaven of likeability
leavens the lurid lump as in Margaret Millar's The Iron Gates
or Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Innocent Mrs. Duff,

By and large they like stories with an American background
and characters better than they do the English variety. They ad-
mire Sherlock Holmes, perhaps more for atmosphere than for
plot, and they like Father Brown much better. For Joshua Clunk
they have small regard and they only {olerate Reggie Fortune.
Oddly enough, they rather like Arthur Crook, perhaps because
he is unobtrusive and doesn’t interfere with character develop-
ment. They laugh at “The Saint.” The bull-dog British brand of
deliberate deduction, as exemplified by Inspector French and Dr.
Priestley, positively infuriates them. Peter Wimsey used to be one
of their favorites — but not the Wimsey of Gaudy Night,

Give them good characters and a sound plot and they don’t care
much about the background — so long as it isn’t the underworld.
Gangsters and their molls leave them cold, as do the dese-dem-and-
dose guys who talk out of the corners of their mouths. Imperious
“Little Caesar” is dead and turned to clay so far as they’re con-
cerned. They like the tinkle of tea cups or highball glasses in a
Westchester garden with a fresh corpse behind the rose bush
much more than the staccato rattle of gangland tommy guns.
Physical brutality in mystery stories is not much to their liking.
Psychological torture is O.K. Physical ditto — ^no. A character can
be scared to death and they like it, but when Mike Shayne or
some similarly indestructible sleuth takes a six hour slugging
from a bunch of hoods, they turn the pages rapidly until he swings
agilely into action a few hours later — ^when they don’t believe it.
Nor does the Judge.

Women don’t like “puzzle” mysteries per se. The puzzle is im-
portant but only if the people in it are the kind you care about.
There is a John Rhode bump on the Judge’s head right now and
the last vestiges of a Freeman Wills Crofts bruise on his chest.
Stories with a scientific background or that depend on chemical
formulae or the like for their elucidation are frequently used as
door-stops.

But, mind you, women are regular devils when it comes to
plots. Much, oh much more persnickety than men. They are not

370 Judge Lynch''

content to finish a story and let it lie. No, if they feel that they
have been deliberately fooled somewhere, theyll go back, and
back and back until they find the place where the author put one
over on them, or dragged a particularly odoriferous herring (how
they hate ’em) across the trail, and if they locate the tiniest crev-
ice in the plot structure — are they mad! Women are much more
attentive to details than men, too. A Southern character who says
“you-all” to a gathering of less than two auditors has run up the
storm signals in the Judge’s Chambers, and the immaculate house-
wife with an apartment full of antiques who loaned her home to
a girl friend with a penchant for throwing moderately wild parties
just didn’t make the grade at alL

Women like their mystery stories as neat as their hair-dos.
When the story concludes, they want no loose ends. They want
every clue and every character present and accounted for. Being
dabsters for detail they rarely forget a person or a clue and they
are much annoyed if the lad or lass who crossed the detective’s
trail in the middle of the story with every appearance of an im-
portant part in the plot is suddenly chucked aside — as some-
times happens — and is among those missing when the cards are
all in and recapitulations are in order. Likewise the deceptively
dangled clue that is introduced with much fanfare and that is
still hanging high at the finish.

Women like plenty of suspense — ^nerve-harrowing suspense at
the expense of biff-bang action in many cases — and they like that
suspense to rise and rise to a sforzando finish. They are annoyed
by stories that ascend to Everest heights of excitement and then,
at the end, go bleh! In that they are not unlike most men readers,
but a terminal let-down affects them more. They don’t, as a rule,
like mass-murders. One ‘‘good” murder is generally enough for
them, although they will tolerate two and possibly three. But
holocausts like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest or The Dain
Curse, to name two favorites of the grisly Judge, set them squirm-
ing. On the other hand, women like Hammett’s Thin Man and
Maltese Falcon and the various masterpieces of Raymond Chand-
ler. They like them in spite of their general dislike for “tough
guy” opera — ^because they are keenly appreciative of brilliant
writing and superb characterization.

Battle of the Sexes 371

Women do not agree with the late S. S. Van Dine that the ugly
head of love should never be raised in a mystery story. They like
stories that have a well-defined but moderate “love interest/* al-
though they draw a thin line of distinction between “mystery
stories** and the emotional crime-novels of the much admired
Mignon Eberhart. And, as they object to love interest overshadow-
ing the grim business of murder and its detection, so do they
scorn the story in which the characters are smart-alecky and greet
each new deed of violence with a wise-crack. They like humor,
of course, but the story that overbalances murder with mirth of-
fends their sense of propriety and is promptly dubbed “silly!**
Then, too, their sense of the fitness of things is frequently dis-
turbed by stupid cops, or dense detectives (professional) who are
scornfully kicked around by a brilliant amateur. As realists they
know that such things ain*t. As noted before they like Sherlock
Holmes, especially The Hound of the Baskervilles^ and fogs and
moors and London of the gaslight era, and they are very fond
of Dr, Watson — in the books. But they hate and despise the ridic-
ulous chuckleheaded blusterer of the film perversion. Again —
“Silly!**

They like a whiff of the “supernatural,** now and then, as in
the frozen horror of Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited or, to a
lesser degree, in Vera Caspary’s Laura with its “return from the
dead.** Such John Carter-Dickson-Carr stories as The Burning
Court chill them delightfully, but it takes all the bluff antics of
H. M. and Dr. Fell to interest many of them in this expert prac-
titioner’s “puzzle** stories. Interesting, too, how they goggle over
ghost stories, when you know that if they ever saw a ghost they’d
shy a shoe at it and go off to sleep again without a tremor.

For masterworks in the allied field of espionage and intrigue
stories they have a grudging admiration. The Judge has never
been able to raise any feminine raves about Eric Ambler’s A Cof-
fin for Dimitrios or the magnificent exploits of Tommy Hamble-
don in the Manning Coles novels. Perhaps it’s because these
books have so little love-interest and so few “nice people.”

Yes, “they must be nice people.” To the Judge’s knowledge,
that has always been a feminine criterion for mystery stories* The
first mystery story the Judge read, at the age of eleven, was given

''Judge Lynch”

372

to him by a woman. His mother. It was a paper-bound copy of
The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green, and it helped
to make the dismal desquamation of a scarlet-fever convalescent
more bearable. It wasn’t a new book, not by many a year, and the
Judge’s mother knew it by heart. One of the reasons why she
gave it to him was that she thought Inspector (or was it Mr.?)
Gryce was “such a very nice person.”

How to Read a Whodunit
By Will Cuppy

oo'odhoooooooooooo'hooooooooool} 000000*

Will Cuppy is by vocation reviewer of mystery and adventure fic-
tion for the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review and
other publications, and by avocation the author of such inimi-
table humorous works as How To Be a Hermit, How To Tell
Your Friends From the Apes, and How To Become Extinct.
{His current *'work in progress*' is known as The Decline and Fall
of Everybody.) He combines vocation and avocation in this unor-
thodox guide for mystery addicts from Mystery Book Magazine for
January

SLSlSLSlSLSLSlSlSl^^ 00000000000 OJULO o o o Q o o p j) o o o o

And hov/ do you like the title of this article? You don't, eh? Why,
a man once wrote a whole book called “How to Read a Book”
and everybody loved the title. I consider mine an improvement.

That book, by the way, sold like wildfire and the man was in-
stantly classed as one of the great thinkers of all time. Thousands
of grateful customers give the tome credit for their present men-
tal state, such as it is.

I didn't read it myself. It came too late to help me, as I had
already read a book.

Now that I look again, there's more sense in my title than ap-
pears at first glance. At least, it gives me a chance to deny the silly
idea that reading a whodunit requires a lot of special equipment,
such as a thorough knowledge of plain and fancy detecting, proper
handling of clues and goodness knows what — a view that actually
keeps some people from tackling mysteries at all. They're afraid
they won't make the grade.

The fact is, it's easy. You just listen to me and you, too, can
read a whodunit.

374 Will Cuppy

No kidding, one of our higher-priced critics recently stated in his
column that he couldn’t undertake to peruse a mystery some pub-
lisher had sent him, since he was not a fan and was not acquainted
with the rules. He wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was any good
or not.

He then proceeded to evaluate a volume dealing, as near as I
could make out, with the fields of politics, economics and the
state of the world in general from the ground up and far into
the future. He had read that one without a moment’s hesitation.
How he did so I have no means of knowing. He didn’t say.

I must admit that there are some desperate puzzlers, devotees
of what they call the real-for-sure detective tale, who carry around
with them a set of rules originally designed by Tom, Dick and
Harry for the authors of such works — ^and pretty foolish some of
the regulations are, too. If the addict finds that one of them has
been broken, he yells that the story is awful. He doesn’t like it.

Well, that’s one way to read a book. These particular persons,
however, appear to be a dwindling species and may soon become
extinct from lack of material to feed upon. Most of their favorite
authors have died off and they aren’t feeling so well themselves.

How, then, should one read a whodunit? If I’m so smart, what is
my advice on the subject?

My first suggestion would be to operate exactly as you would
with any other form of light printed matter bound in the form
of a book or magazine, without any laws of the Medes and Per-
sians in your mind, which probably has enough to handle with-
out that.

What, you just begin at the first page, then go to the second
and so forth until you’ve had enough? That’s right. And if you
like the stuff you’re lucky. If not, toss the volume out the window.

Jumping around in the book, of course, is allowable as a pre-
liminary in the case of customers who simply have to do that be-
fore they buy or rent a whodunit. They have to know how it looks
in the middle and whether it sounds tight at various other points.
They can tell in one minute whether or not the whole will appeal
to them. This is a frequently rewarding habit to which I myself
am somewhat given.

For instance, if you open to Page 30 and find three or four

How to Read a Whodunit 375

Jerks pointing guns at one another in various stages of sadistic
glee, you drop it with a mild curse and try another whodunit and
hope for better luck.

In a word, if whatever page you open proves beyond the shadow
of a doubt that the author should be in an institution and that
the publisher should be hanged, read no more in that one. Thus
you are spared hours of agony and two bucks. So much for jump-
ing around. One might almost say, look before you leap into a
whodunit.

But no peeking into the last chapter to see who shot the phi-
landering delicatessen man in his place of businessl Anyhow, that’s
what most people would tell you. That is supposed to be far-
thest south in moral turpitude, the equivalent of cheating at soli-
taire and the very hallmark of a low and despicable nature.

Is it that bad, really? Let us realize that some people simply
cannot wait two hours to see whether or not Grandma, bedridden
for ages and supposedly unable to sit up for her gruel, committed
the series of dastardly crimes which held the village in the grip
of terror for so long.

Of course Grandma is guilty as hell, as the reader ought to
know without peeking. I knew it the instant I laid eyes on her
and heard that she hadn’t taken a step these twenty years or more.
She’s been getting up at night, disguising herself and shooting
folks almost at random, then beating it back to bed in time to
fool the family, a battery of trained nurses and two generations
of local cops.

Most of us can let such a story run its natural course, aware
that we’ll know all the details in the end. Peckers are different,
that’s all, and what I say is, why not let them alone? What harm
do they do you and me? Besides, they probably can’t help it. The
Guppy Plan gives them a break, but I’m not saying that I’d trust
any of them with my watch, if I had one.

Which brings us to the rather more vital problem of fast or
slow reading. There again I’d leave it up to the individual, with
the suggestion that perhaps those who take their time are more
likely to understand what goes on in the book and that it must
be more fun to know, if only vaguely, what you are reading about.

There are persons who tear through a mystery in half an hour

376 Will Cuppy

at most, sometimes much less, then start a new one. They may be
prodigies of some kind, but I notice that they hate to be cross-
questioned on the details of the will and such matters. When cor-
nered, they try to change the subject or grow sulky and silent.

What they get out of their lightning activities I can't say, but
I can guess. On the other hand, some people practically form each
syllable with their lips and seem to be little the wiser.

As for those who consume whodunits with the radio on full
blast and a blissful smile on their maps, no comment. Since this
form of pleasure does not come under the head of reading, it falls
outside the scope of this article. I pass these happy ones by with
my blessing. Live and let live is my motto.

I have never rightly understood all this talk about reading mys-
teries in bed, but they say it’s wonderful. I don’t know whether
it is supposed to put you to sleep, or keep you awake, or what.
Oh, well, it’s none of my business what people do at that time of
night.

Four Mystery Reviews

Toinnnsinj 0 <iooooooofiooooooooooo<roo<roooooooboijo oinnnnr

It is every reviewer's dream that he will recognize genius and
penetrate pretentiousness — and his nightmare that he won't. How
have mystery critics fared with some of the classics of the past?

Absence of comment is sometimes comment in itself. Edgar
Allan Poe’s first two detective tales {''The Murders in the Rue
Morgue” and "The Mystery of Marie Roget”) made their first
appearances in magazines, and it is therefore not too surprising
that no contemporary criticism of them seems to exist. But Poe’s
third and greatest Dupin story, "The Purloined Letter” was in-
cluded in the pre-dated "annual” The Gift: 1845, ^ handsome
presentation volume which received a detailed though unsigned
review on the first page of young Mr. Greeley’s newly-founded
New York Tribune for October 4, 1844. Occupying more than a
column over-all, this chatty critique complimented the publishers
at length on the "elegance” of their offering to the holiday pur-
chaser, praised the illustrations in detail, reprinted poems by Em-
erson and Longfellow, in full, and found room to speak glow-
ingly of a half-dozen or more of the prose contributors by name
— but mentioned proud Israfel and his tale of the ingeniously con-
cealed epistle not at all! Almost needless to say, no other prose
selection in the volume survives or is read today.

In short, the sole approach to a contemporary "review” of "The
Purloined Letter” which your editor has seen is the brief intro-
ductory note (found on page lyo of the present volume) accom-
panying the abridged reprinting of the tale in Chambers’ Edin-
burgh Journal for November ^o, 1844.

A similar critical vacuum surrounds the first Sherlock Holmes
story by Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, which — accord-
ing to Dorothy Sayers — "was flung like a bombshell into the field
of detective fiction” when it appeared as the featured story in
Beeton’s Christmas Annual late in i88y. If Miss Sayers is correct,
this must surely be one of the earliest instances on record of a

377

378 Four Mystery Reviews

delayed-action bomb; for diligent search by your editor over a
period of years has failed to unearth anything nearer to a bona
fide review than this one-line (possibly pre-publication) ‘^notice'*
accorded Beeton’s by the English booktrade journal^, the Publish-
ers* Circular, for December 6^ i88y: . . the leading fiction \ix.

Doyle's tala'] ... is vigorously written and possesses much sensa-
tional interest."

So much for comment by omission. Of the four representative
reviews selected for reproduction below, the Athenaeum’s evalua-
tion in 1868 of Wilkie Collins' immortal Moonstone does not
fare too badly, all things considered, on the score of prescience —
though the anonymous reviewer does not always select for his ad-
miration the same qualities esteemed by modern readers of the
novel. ... The same journal's consideration in i8po of Doyle's
second Holmes novel. The Sign of Four, is chiefly memorable,
aside from its unique prose style, for the entire omission of ref-
erence to the central character and the astounding prophecy in
the last sentence. ... In several respects the American Book-
man’s staid and eminently respectable ipi^ review of E. C. Bent-
ley's Trent’s Last Case might almost have appeared in this week's
book supplement. Yet {allowing fo'^ the manifest advantages of
hindsight) the opening statement does seem a little odd, when one
recalls that this is the novel which later historians have credited
with changing the whole course of the detective romance by its
introduction of '^character." Nor does the reviewer, writing at a
time when the great number of detective stories were virtually un-
readable (if you don't believe it, go back and try some), seem un-
duly cognizant of the superior literary qualities, the humor and
naturalism, that have enabled Bentley's masterpiece to survive the
years.

The final and only signed review, Dashiell Hammett on S. S. Van
Dine's The Benson Murder Case, is in many ways the most re-
markable of the four. In recent years it has become somewhat the
fashion (often unjustly) to scorn Van Dine and all his works. But
it should be remembered that when Hammett loosed his shatter-
ing shaft in ip2*j, Van Dine was by way of becoming the high priest
and Philo Vance the patron saint of ''intellectual" detective story
fanciers — and Ogden Nash's famous dictum concerning the latter

Four Mystery Reviews 379

individuaVs need for a kick in the ^'pance*' was still some years
away; while Hammett {not yet the author of The Maltese Falcon
or any published hook) teas known only to readers of the pulp maga-
zine Black Mask. ... The weakness in Hammetfs argument, of
course, is that in insisting on the yardstick of literal realism, he de-
nies to Van Dine the artistic license so necessary for acceptance of
his {Hammetfs) own superb hardboiled but equally unrealistic de-
tective romances. For a delightful comparison of the private in-
vestigator in fiction and in fact {a subject too long neglected) read
John Bartlow Martin's ''Peekaboo Pennington, Private Eye" in
Harper’s for May 1^46. {See also Hammetfs own "From the Me-
moirs of a Private Detective" in the present volume.)

Now the reviews.

1 . THE MOONSTONE

(From the Athenaeum, London, July 25, 1868)

When persons are in a state of ravenous hunger they are eager
only for food, and utterly ignore all delicate distinctions of cook-
ery; it is only when this savage state has been somewhat allayed
that they are capable of discerning and appreciating the genius
of the chef. Those readers who have followed the fortunes of the
mysterious Moonstone for many weeks, as it has appeared in tan-
talizing portions, will of course throw themselves headlong upon
the latter portion of the third volume, now that the end is really
come,^ and devour it without rest or pause; to take any delib-
erate breathing-time is quite out of the question, and we promise
them a surprise that will find the most experienced novel-reader
unprepared. The unravelment of the puzzle is a satisfactory re-
ward for all the interest out of which they have been beguiled.
When, however, they have read to the end, we recommend them

♦ This refers to the fact that The Moonstone appeared serially in Bickens’ weekly
All the Year Round, beginning in January 1868 and ending in August; thus the
5-decker book edition, published in July, anticipated the completion of serialization
by some weeks. Information by courtesy of David Randall, the Scribner Bookstore,
New York. — En.

380 Four Mystery Reviews

to read the book over again from the beginning, and they will
see, what on a first perusal they were too engrossed to observe,
the carefully elaborate workmanship, and the wonderful con-
struction of the story; the admirable manner in which every cir-
cumstance and incident is fitted together, and the skill with which
the secret is kept to the last; so that even when all seems to have
been discovered there is a final light thrown upon people and
things which give them a significance they had not before. The
“epilogue*’ of The Moonstone is beautiful. It redeems the some-
what sordid detective element, by a strain of solemn and pathetic
human interest. Few will read of the final destiny of The Moon-
stone without feeling the tears rise in their eyes as they catch the
last glimpse of the three men, who have sacrificed their caste in the
service of their God, when the vast crowd of worshippers opens
for them, as they embrace each other and separate to begin their
lonely and never-ending pilgrimage of expiation. The deepest
emotion is certainly reserved to the last.

As to the various characters of the romance, they are secondary
to the circumstances. The hero and heroine do not come out very
distinctly, though we are quite willing to take them upon testi-
mony. Ezra Jennings, the doctor’s assistant, is the one personage
who makes himself felt by the reader. The slight sketch of his his-
tory, left purposely without details, the beautiful and noble na-
ture developed in spite of calumny, loneliness, and the pain of a
deadly malady, is drawn with a firm and masterly hand; it has
an aspect of reality which none of the other personages possess,
though we fancy we should recognize old Betteredge if we were
to meet him, even without a copy of Robinson Crusoe in his
handl We wish some means could have been found to save Ros-
anna Spearman. The cloud that hangs over her horrible death
might have been lifted by a true artist, and she might have been
allowed to live and recover her right mind, under the tender in-
fluence of her friend, “Limping Lucy.” Mr. Godfrey Ablewhite,
the distinguished philanthropist and his lady worshippers, as seen
by the light thrown on him by his ardent admirer, Miss Clack,
is very cleverly managed; the reader suspects him, like Sergeant
Cuff and Mr. Bruff; but the reader is destined to be quite as much
taken by surprise as they were.

Four Mystery Reviews

381

IL THE SIGN OF FOUR
(From the Athenaeum, London, December 6, 1890)

A detective story is usually lively reading, but we cannot pre-
tend to think that The Sign of Four is up to the level of the
writer’s best work. It is a curious medley, and full of horrors; and
surely those who play at hide and seek with the fatal treasure are
a curious company. The wooden-legged convict and his fiendish
misshapen little mate, the ghastly twins, the genial prizefighters,
the detectives wise and foolish, and the gentle girl whose lover
tells the tale, twist in and out together in a mazy dance, culminat-
ing in that mad and terrible rush down the river which ends the
mystery and the treasure. Dr. Doyle’s admirers will read the little
volume through eagerly enough, but they will hardly care to take
it up again.

III. TRENT’S LAST CASE
(From the Bookmafi, New York, May, 1913)

Although he just fails of making Philip Trent a personality,
Mr. E. C. Bentley, in The Woman in Black, ^ has constructed a
detective story of unusual originality and ingenuity. An American
multi-millionaire, a power in the world’s finance, is murdered on
his estate on the south coast of England. Half a dozen persons are
presented to the reader as possible objects of suspicion — the dead
man’s young wife, the ''Woman in Black,” his American secretary,
his English secretary, an elderly Englishman with whom he has
had a violent quarrel, his butler, and a French maid. Trent, a
painter, who on several previous occasions has shown decided tal-
ent in solving criminal mysteries, is sent to the scene of the crime
by a great London newspaper. There is the inevitable foil in the
person of Inspector Murch, of the official police, whose years of ex-
perience in the practical service of Scotland Yard avail him but
little when pitted against the superior imagination of the brilliant
amateur. Trent finds the key to a greater part of the mystery in

* Title of the first American publication of Trends Last Case; subsequent Ameri-
can editions have employed the original English title. — ^E d,

gSs Four Mystery Reviews

a pair of worn patent leather shoes that had belonged to the dead
American multi-millionaire, and in certain finger prints. But the
story of the affair that he writes out but does not send to his news-
paper lacks accuracy in one or two important points, the explana-
tion that seems to cover everything when the book has run less
than two-thirds its course is not quite complete, and it is not un-
til the final chapter is reached that the reader is in possession of
the full account of the events surrounding the death of Sigsbee
Manderson. In his use of Americanisms, Mr. Bentley is rather bet-
ter than most English writers, which is not saying a great deal.

IV. THE BENSON MURDER CASE

(Review by Dashiell Hammett in the Saturday Review
of Literature y New York, January 15, 1927)

Alvin Benson is found sitting in a wicker chair in his living
room, a book still in his hand, his legs crossed, and his body com-
fortably relaxed in a life-like position. He is dead. A bullet from
an Army model Colt .45 automatic pistol, held some six feet away
when the trigger was pulled, has passed completely through his
head. That his position should have been so slightly disturbed by
the impact of such a bullet at such a range is preposterous, but
the phenomenon hasn’t anything to do with the plot, so don’t, as
I did, waste time trying to figure it out. The murderer’s identity
becomes obvious quite early in the story. The authorities, no mat-
ter how stupid the author chose to make them, would have cleared
up the mystery promptly if they had been allowed to follow the
most rudimentary police routine. But then what would there have
been for the gifted Vance to do?

This Philo Vance is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition and his
conversational manner is that of a high-school girl who has been
studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dic-
tionary. He is a bore when he discusses art and philosophy, but
when he switches to criminal psychology he is delightful. There
is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must,
if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect.
Vance disproves this theory: he manages always, and usually ridic-
ulously, to be wrong. His exposition of the technique employed

Four Mystery Reviews 383

by a gentleman shooting another gentleman who sits six feet in
front of him deserves a place in a How to be a detective by mail
course.

To supply this genius with a field for his operations the author
has to treat his policemen abominably. He doesn’t let them ask
any questions that aren’t wholly irrelevant. They can’t make in-
quiries of any one who might know anything. They aren’t per-
mitted to take any steps toward learning whether the dead man
was robbed. Their fingerprint experts are excluded from the scene
of the crime. When information concerning a mysterious box of
jewelry accidentally bobs up everybody resolutely ignores it, since
it would have led to a solution before the three-hundredth page,

Mr. Van Dine doesn’t deprive his officials of every liberty, how-
ever: he generously lets them compete with Vance now and then
in the expression of idiocies. Thus Heath, a police detective-
sergeant, says that any pistol of less than .44 calibre is too small to
stop a man, and the district attorney, Markham, displays an
amazed disinclination to admit that a confession could actually
be false. This Markham is an outrageously naive person: the most
credible statement in the tale is to the effect that Markham served
only one term in this office. The book is written in the little-did-
he-realize style.

The Ethics of the Mystery Novel
By Anthony Boucher

oooooooboooooo o o o 'o o o o o o o o o oiroToinrrirr^

Some of the most original and provocative American criticism —
as distinguished from reviewing — of crime and mystery literature
has been appearing in recent years over the signature of Anthony
Boucher, detective novelist and crime specialist for the San Fran-
cisco Chronicle. The selection by Mr, Boucher which follows,
however, was published in Tricolor (the American edition of La
France Libre) for October 1944. Whether or not the reader agrees
with Mr, Boucher in all respects (it is possible, for example, to
argue that the best answer to reactionary propaganda in the who-
dunit is not necessarily counter-propaganda, but the absence of
special pleading) he must grant that here is forthright criticism
in the higher meaning of the word and with — literally — a venge-
ance.

Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 a P i) 0 0 0 0 0 0 a P Q 0 0 ,0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q a 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q.

The phrase, *‘the ethics of the mystery novel,” is a commonplace
of mystery writers* shop talk and always means one thing: the
fair-play technique by which the author scrupulously presents all
relevant facts and enables the reader (at least in theory) to solve
the problem as readily as the detective.

This piece is not, however, a consideration of the fairness of
Roger Ackroyd or the legitimate use of the insane murderer. Its
title means that it will try to sketch the ethical problems and at-
titudes present in the contemporary whodunit.

^Ethics?” you say. ”In the mystery novel?” But why not? It is
all but impossible for any writer above the hack level (and many
mystery novelists are far above it) to write about people and prob-
lems without implying some set of values, some ethical standard.

384

The Ethics of the Mystery Novel 385

And the mystery novel, dealing as it must with crime and pun-
ishment (and now so often with political ideology) can never ef-
fect quite so complete an escape from realities as the hammock
romance or the western.

Mystery novels, particularly since the burgeoning of the pocket-
size reprints, reach an audience running at least into the hundreds
of thousands. Any ethical tendencies detectable in such a field
surely deserve examination.

Back in the 'thirties there was occasional concern from the ‘Left
about the mystery novel. The very form of the whodunit, with its
asserted glorification of the police (cossacks to you), was de-
nounced as essentially fascistic. The argument hardly needed an
answer; if any had been needed, it came in Italy and Germany
in the fascist ban on the corrupt and democratic mystery novel.

A more plausible interpretation of the political meaning of the
mystery novel in general is that of Howard Haycraft, who has
often maintained, notably in his invaluable history Murder for
Pleasure^ the thesis that the very essence of the whodunit is demo-
cratic, that its interest depends upon a concept of absolute justice,
a detective resolved to find the murderer and not (as a Gestapo
or NKVD man might prefer) a frameable enemy of the State, and
that the mystery can flourish only in a democracy — a thesis borne
out by geographic and historical fact.

But if the mystery as a form is democratic, what political opin-
ions find expression within that form? Marie Rodell, in her es-
sential textbook Mystery Fiction: Theory & Technique ^ lays down
the rule that “As escape literature, the mystery is not designed
to preach a message, correct an evil, or advocate a Utopia. Con-
troversies on such questions as these are among the things the
reader is trying to escape from," and goes on to insist that the
mystery writer cannot use “highly controversial material,"

This is a somewhat misleading statement of the situation. The
body of mysteries, to be sure, has not been “controversial"; it has
simply assumed, without controversy, the most conservative atti-
tude toward the status quo. In most mysteries up to recent years,
you could safely assume that a labor organizer was a racketeer,
that a Communist had a bomb in his pocket, that a Negro was
either sinister or comedy relief, that the British caste system was

386 Anthony Boucher

inviolate and a Good Thing, and that imperialism was the glory
of the Anglo-Saxon race, on either side of the Atlantic.

This attitude is no longer invariable. In The Brass Chills,
Hugh Pentecost presented a Communist who was intelligent and
a man of good will. In Judas Incorporated, Kurt Steel combined
a first-rate mystery with a solidly pro-union labor novel, probably
achieving, through its greater readability, more propaganda value
than a half-dozen proletarian epics. In Johnny on the Spot, Amen
Dell wrote a story that was as quietly and uncontroversially pro-
labor as any earlier mystery had ever been labor-baiting.

The mystery has, of course always dealt largely with the
moneyed and overmoneyed classes, and some reflection of their
attitudes was inevitable. But the past decade has tended, in the
words of Raymond Chandler, '‘to get murder away from the up-
per classes, the week-end house party and the vicar's rose-garden,
and back to the people who are really good at it"; and even the
writers who cling to the wealthy are beginning to assume a slightly
more critical attitude toward them.

This same trend away from the upper classes has made the
racial question in the mystery more acute. The common man may
be no more anti-semitic or anti-Negro than the wealthy, but he is
more pungent in his expression of his dislikes. Such writers as
Chandler have legitimately recorded this pungency; lesser fry have
seemed almost to revel in it — even to take for granted that the
reader concurs, as in H. W. Roden's You Only Hang Once, which
presents an intelligent, educated, supposedly likeable hero whose
sole word for Jew is yid. It is true of the mystery, as of most
popular fiction, that a sympathetic protagonist is of necessity white
and a gentile. Oddly, it is quite permissible for him to be a
Catholic, though one writer whose detective is a nun reports that
his novels have often been rejected for reprints because of their
"controversial" nature.

This double pattern of legitimate recording and wilful wallow-
ing exists also, particularly in the hard-boiled school, in regard
to sex. The mystery novel as originally developed, especially in
England, was so sexless as to bear little relation to life or crime.
The inevitable reaction has torn down the barriers until (again
pace Rodell on Tabus) there are few sexual manifestations which

The Ethics of the Mystery Novel 387

have not been at least suggested in murder novels. At times (one
thinks o£ Georges Simenon or of Matthew Head's The Smell of
Money) these suggestions have been novelistically valid and pow-
erful; at other times (libel laws advise no mention of names)
they have approached the pornographic.

The sexual ethic of the whodunit as a whole (aside from the
fast-and-loose school in which characters leap in and out of bed
with singular ease and innocence) might be described simply as
a recognition of the sexual mores of our times, particularly as
motivating factors in crime.

Except, of course, for the slick female hammock novel, in which
sex (under the trade name of love) and avarice (disguised as am-
bition and the American way) are the sole motivating forces of
all characters. The blithe amorality of the people of Jonathan
Latimer or Richard Shattuck seems clean and refreshing beside
the smug hypocrisy of the Cinderella heroine who lies, cheats,
steals (and usually gets herself almost — ^but never quite — ^killed)
to protect the stalwart hero, not because she is convinced of his
innocence, but because she must save him from the gallows for the
altar, guilty or not.

The moral attitude of the mystery novel toward murder is pre-
dominantly, as one might imagine, that of Coolidge's minister
toward sin. But a sympathetic murderer occasionally goes scot
free, or more frequently is allowed to contrive his own exit. The
killing of a murderer, even when the element of self-defense is
scarcely present, is generally condoned; private, rather than pub-
lic justice is frequently invoked in the denouement. Exact statis-
tics are lacking, but one might estimate that at least two mur-
derers meet death at their own hands, or those of other characters,
for every one that goes to the chair, gallows, or gas chamber.

Inevitably, private execution is common in the spy novel. A
few writers, notably Graham Greene and Dorothy B. Hughes,
have shown a concern for the moral eflEect of necessary killing
upon a man inherently bonae voluntatis. More make the killing
of the enemy either a ^im but perfunctory business matter (an
attitude excellently exploited by Peter Cheyney) or more fre-
quently Just good clean fun. The grounds need not be sufficient
for rational Judgment; let a man (today) once be suspected of

g88 Anthony Boucher

being a Nazi and he is fair game for any sympathetic character.

As dangerous a tendency as is visible in the field at present is
this of the spy novel to plant the most elemental racial suspicion
and enmity. In the run of the mill spy story, you can know at
once that any character with a guttural accent or a Prussian hair^
cut is, by logical progression, therefore a Nazi, therefore also the
murderer; therefore also a legitimate private target. Which is a
specimen of the very reasoning which, according to Mr. Hay-
craft, makes the mystery novel impossible in any totalitarian
country.

(Curious parallel: If a character says I for r, you know he is
supposed to be Japanese, though the opposite confusion is the
linguistic fact.)

The spy novel has been growing in popularity (at least among
writers and publishers) since 1939 until for the past year spy
stories have made up more than a third of the books which I
have read as a mystery reviewer. Inevitably the spy novel must,
in a time like this, be a propaganda novel; one cannot write of
a duel between American and Axis agents with the romantic and
forgetful impartiality of a novelist writing about the Blue and
the Gray.

Many spy novels reduce this propaganda to its simplest terms,
offering a black and white picture of Good men vs Huns which
sounds like the 1917 vintage or even more like Cowboys vs In-
dians. But the best of the current spy stories probe deeper. They
are aware that this is not simply a war against Germans and Japs,
but a battle against Fascism. And they realize that a fascist is not
necessarily an enemy alien,

Ethel Vance in Escape^ Michael Hardt in A Stranger and
Afraid^ Katharine Roberts in her Belgian novels, and various
others have successfully portrayed the conflict of fascism and hu-
manity in Europe, Mark Saxton in The Year of August, John Au-
gust in Advance Agent, and most surprisingly Leslie Gharteris
in The Saint Steps In have depicted the perils of that purely Amer-
ican fascism whose slogan will be, inescapably, '*No isms but
Americanism.**

This is perhaps the field in which the propaganda value of the
mystery may be mmt beneficial. The average reader does not need

The Ethics of the Mystery Novel 389

to be told to hate the enemy, but he may need occasional prompt-
ings as to who the enemy is; and The Saint Steps In may, in its
picaresque way, open eyes that have not read Under Cover.

There is other propaganda present in the mystery. There is
Dennis Wheatley's Faked Passports which explains that Goering is
a gentleman and that one could easily do business with the Prus-
sian generals. There is Helen Macinnes’ While Still We Live^
which defends the Polish aristocracy by minimizing the impor-
tance of idealogical differences and implying that democracy is
only one of many tenable political attitudes.

There is Cleve F. Adams' Up Jumps the Devils a stalwart white
Nordic novel which has only contempt for what the author con-
sistently terms kikes, wops, spigs, and niggers, and only scorn for
the war effort. The private detective here solves the case by guess-
ing at a suspect, kidnaping him, and having him tortured by a gang-
ster until he confesses. When an F. B. L man objects to these
Gestapo-like methods, the private eye ringingly proclaims, “An
American Gestapo is what we goddamned well needl"

These three books are hardly typical of the field. The mystery
novel is a microcosm; and almost every type, taste or trend can
be found therein that exists in fiction as a whole. But to gen-
eralize as far as is safe, it can be said that there is little danger in
the growing popularity of the whodunit.

As opposed to the reader of the so-called “general" fiction, the
mystery fan will be indoctrinated with a slightly more reaction-
ary view on labor and race relations (though the influence of the
liberal left is slowly increasing), but a much sharper awareness
of the possible growth of American fascism; a slightly more care-
free attitude toward sex, but a much sterner sense of Justice and
retribution.

And if liberals are impatient (as some may well be) with the
mystery’s slow emergence from conservatism, they have two pos-
sible courses of action: to write to mystery editors (who do read
such mail) praising liberal books and damning the devils which
jump up; or themselves to write mystery novels which will present
the liberal viewpoint, not dogmatically, but easily and taken-for-
granted. And thereby brighten the days of at least one reviewer.

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?
By Edmund Wilson

wrrzrinrrtnnnrnnnrTB^^

At the height of the literary season 1^44-4^^ the eminent Arner-
ican critic and novelist Edmund Wilson published in the New
Yorker {of which he is chief literary critic) a now-famous series of
three leading articles sharply critical of modern detective stories
and their readers* The outcries of the faithful touched off by this
circumstance surpassed even the storm that greeted the English
critic Howard Spring (who shares Mr. Wilson's disapproval of the
genre) when^ a few years ago, he reviewed a detective novel and
disclosed the murderer, method, and motive.

Since {we must face facts) there are some people who unhappily
don't like detective stories, and since freedom and representation
are our watchwords, Mr. Wilson is made welcome to the present
pages as an honored guest, a visitor from another and sadder
world. In the further interest of hospitality, the second of his
articles — in which he has the advantage of rebuttal and restate-
ment of his position — has been chosen for reprinting, in order
to present his missionary message in the fairest possible light. {His
third article, a re-examination of the Sherlock Holmes saga, is
less directly pertinent to the main disettssion.) The present selec-
tion appeared in the New Yorker for January 20, 1943. It is re-
printed by permission of Mr. Wilson and the New Yorker. Copy-
right 194^ The F-R. Publishing Corporation. . . . Without
further comment, Mr. Wilson.

Three months ago I wrote in these pages — ^in the issue o£ Octo-
ber i4th---aii article on some recent detective stories. I had not
read any fiction of this kind since the days of Sherlock Holmes,
and, since I constantly heard animated discussions of the merits

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? 391

of the mystery writers, I was curious to see what it was like today.
The specimens I read I found disappointing, and I made some
rather derogatory remarks on my impression of the genre in gen-
eral. To my surprise, this brought me letters of protest in a vol-
ume and of a passionate earnestness which had hardly been elic-
ited even by my occasional criticisms of the Soviet Union. Of the
thirty-nine letters that have reached me, only seven approve my
strictures. The writers of almost all the others seem deeply of-
fended and shocked, and they all say almost exactly the same
thing: that I had simply not read the right novels and that I would
surely have a different opinion if I would only try this or that
author recommended by the correspondent. In many of these let-
ters there was a note of asperity, and one lady went so far as to
declare that she would never read this department again unless I
was prepared to reconsider my position. In the meantime, further-
more, a number of other writers have published articles defending
the detective story: Jacques Barzun, Joseph Wood Krutch,* Ray-
mond Chandler,* and Somerset Maugham have all had something
to say on the subject — nor has the umbrageous Bernard DeVoto
failed to raise his voice.

Overwhelmed by so much insistence, I at last wrote my cor-
respondents that I would try to correct any injustice by under-
taking to read some of the authors that had received the most
recommendations and taking the whole matter up again. The
preferences of these readers, however, when I had a tabulation
of them made, turned out to be extremely divergent. They ranged
over fifty-two writers and sixty-seven books, most of which got
only one or two votes each. The only writers who got as many
as five or over were Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio
Marsh, Michael Innes, Raymond Chandler, and the author who
writes under the names of Carter Dickson and John Dickson Carr.

The writer that my correspondents were most nearly unanimous
in putting at the top was Miss Dorothy L. Sayers, who was pressed
upon me by eighteen people, and the book of hers that eight of
them were sure I could not fail to enjoy was a story called The
Nine Tailors, Well, I set out to read The Nine Tailors in the
hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I must confess that

♦Found elsewhere in this volume.*— 3^.

Edmund Wilson

39 ^

it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered
in any field. The first part of it is all about bell-ringing as it is
practised in English churches and contains a lot of information
of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia arti-
cle on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found
myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between
conventional English village characters; “Oh, here’s Hinkins with
the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras,
but they do go on all the year round and make a background,”
etc. There was also a dreadful conventional English nobleman
of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of
Lord Peter Wimsey, and, though he was the focal character in the
novel, being Miss Dorothy Sayers’ version of the inevitable Sher-
lock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him, too. In
the meantime, I was losing the story, which had not got a firm
grip on my attention, but I went back and picked it up and stead-
fastly pushed through to the end, and there I discovered that the
whole point was that if a man was shut up in a belfry while a
heavy peal of chimes was being rung, the vibrations of the bells
might kill him. Not a bad idea for a murder, and Conan Doyle
would have known how to dramatize it in an entertaining tale
of thirty pages, but Miss Sayers had not hesitated to pad it out
to a book of three hundred and thirty, contriving one of those
stock cock-and-bull stories about a woman who commits bigamy
without knowing it and larding the whole thing with details of
church architecture, bits of quaint lore from books about bell
ringing, and the awful whimsical patter of Lord Peter.

I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well,
and I felt that my correspondents had been playing her as their
literary ace. But, really, she does not write very well; it is simply
that she is mote consciously literary than most of the other de-
tectivc'-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field
which is mostly on a sub-literary level. In any serious department
of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction
at all. Yet, commonplace in this respect though she is, she gives
an impression of brilliant talent if we put her beside Miss Ngaio
Marsh, whose Overture to Death was also suggested by several
correspondents* Mr. DeVoto has put himself on record as believ-

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroydf 393

ing that Miss Marsh, as well as Miss Sayers and Miss Margery
Allingham, writes her novels in “excellent prose/’ and this throws
for me a good deal of light on Mr. DeVoto’s opinions as a critic.
I hadn’t quite realized before, in spite of his own rather messy
style, that he was totally insensitive to writing. It would be im-
possible, I should think, for anyone with the faintest feeling for
words to describe the unappetizing sawdust which Miss Marsh
has poured into her pages as “excellent prose” or as prose at all
except in the sense that distinguishes prose from verse. And here
again the book is mostly padding. There is the notion that you
could commit a murder by rigging up a gun in a piano, so that
the victim will shoot himself when he presses down the pedal, but
this is embedded in the dialogue and doings of a lot of faked-up
English county people who are even more tedious than those of
The Nine Tailors.

The enthusiastic reader of detective stories will indignantly ob-
ject at this point that I am reading for the wrong things: that I
ought not to be expecting good writing, characterization, human
interest, or even atmosphere. He is right, of course, though I was
not fully aware of it till I attempted Flowers for the Judge, con-
sidered by connoisseurs one of the best books of one of the masters
of this school, Miss Margery Allingham. I looked forward to this
novel especially because it was read by a member of my family,
an expert of immense experience, and reported upon very favor-
ably, before I had got to it myself. But when I did, I found it
completely unreadable. The story and the writing alike showed
a surface so wooden and dead that I could not keep my mind on
the page. How can you care who committed a murder which has
never really been made to take place, because the writer hasn’t
any ability of even the most ordinary kind to make you see it or
feel it? How can you probe the possibilities of guilt among char-
acters who all seem alike because they are all simply names on the
page? It was then that I understood that a true connoisseur of this
fiction is able to suspend the demands of his imagination and
literary taste and take the thing as an intellectual problem. But
how you arrive at that state of mind is what I do not understand.

In the light of this revelation, I feel that it is probably irrelevant
to mention that I enjoyed The Burning Courts by John Dickson

Edmund Wilson

394

Carr, more than the novels of any of these ladies. There is a tinge
of black magic which gives it a little of the interest of a horror
story, and the author has a virtuosity at playing with alternative
hypotheses which makes this element of detective fiction more
amusing than it usually is.

I want, however, to take up certain points made by the writers
of the above-mentioned articles.

Mr. Barzun informs the non-expert that the detective novel is
a kind of game in which the reader of a given story, in order
to play properly his hand, should be familiar with all the devices
that have already been used in other stories. These devices, it
seems, are now barred: the reader must challenge the writer to
solve his problem in some novel way, and the writer puts it up to
the reader to guess the new solution. This may be true, but I
shall never qualify. I would rather play Twenty Questions, which
at least does not involve the consumption of hundreds of ill-
written books.

A point made by three of these writers, Mr. Maugham, Mr. De-
Voto, and Mr. Krutch, is that the novel has become so philosophi-
cal, so psychological, and so symbolic that the public have had to
take to the detective story as the only department of fiction where
pure story-telling still survives.

This seems to me to involve two fallacies. On the one hand, it
is surely not true that ‘*the serious novelists of today” — to quote
Mr. Maugham’s assertion — *‘have often,” in contrast to the novel-
ists of the past, ‘little or no story to tell,” that “they have allowed
themselves to be persuaded that to tell a story is a negligible form
of art.” Joyce and Proust and Mann — ^who, I suppose, must be
accounted the heaviest going — ^have all their peculiar modern
ways of boring and playing tricks on the reader. But how about
Richardson and Sterne? How about the dreadful bogs and ob-
stacles that one has to get over in Scott? the interpolated essays
in Hugo? the leaking tap of Thackeray’s reflections on life, in
which the story is always trickling away? Now, all these top nov-
elists of the present time do certainly have stories to tell and they
have organized their books with an intensity which has been rela-
tively rare in the novel and which, to my mind, more than makes
up for the occasional viscosity of their narrative.

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroydf 395

On the other hand, it seems to me — for reasons that I have sug-
gested in my complaints above — perfectly fantastic to say that
the average detective novel is an example of good story-telling.
The gift for telling stories is uncommon, like other artistic gifts,
and the only one of this group of writers — the witers my cor-
respondents have praised — ^who seems to me to possess it to any
degree is Mr. Raymond Chandler. His Farewell^ My Lovely is the
only one of these books that I have read all of and read with en-
joyment. But Chandler, though in his recent article he seems to
claim Hammett as his father, does not really belong to this school
of the old-fashioned detective novel. What he writes is a novel of
adventure which has less in common with Hammett than with
Alfred Hitchcock and Graham Greene — the modern spy story
which has substituted the jitters of the Gestapo and the G.P.U.
for the luxury world of E. Phillips Oppenheim. It is not simply
a question here of a puzzle which has been put together but of a
malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy
which is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely
forms. To write such a novel successfully you must be able to
invent character and incident and to generate atmosphere, and all
this Mr. Chandler can do, though he is a long way below Graham
Greene. It is only when I get to the end that I feel my old crime-
story depression descending upon me again — because here again,
as is so often the case, the explanation of the mysteries, when
it comes, is neither interesting nor plausible enough. It fails to
justify the excitement produced by the picturesque and sinister
happenings, and I cannot help feeling cheated.

My experience with this second batch of novels has, therefore,
been even more disillusioning than my experience with the first,
and my final conclusion is that the reading of detective stories is
simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness,
ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking. This
conclusion seems borne out by the violence of the letters I have
been receiving. Detective-story readers feel guilty, they are habitu-
ally on the defensive, and all their talk about *Vell-written’* mys-
teries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the
alcoholic can always produce for a drink. One of the letters I have
had shows the addict in his frankest and most shameless phase.

Edmund Wilson

396

This lady begins by trying, like the others, to give me some guid-
ance in picking out the better grade of stories, but as she pro-
ceeds, she goes all to pieces. She says that she has read hundreds
of detective stories, but *‘it is surprising how few I would recom-
mend to another. However, a poor detective story is better than
none at all. Try again. With a little better luck, you’ll find one
you admire and enjoy. Then you, too, may be

A Mystery Fiend.”

This letter has made my blood run cold: so the opium smoker
tells the novice not to mind if the first pipe makes him sick; and
I fall back for reassurance on the valiant little band of readers
who sympathize with my views on the subject. One of these tells
me that I have underestimated both the badness of the detective
stories themselves and the lax mental habits of those who enjoy
them. The worst of it is, he says, that the true addict, half the
time, never even finds out who has committed the murder. The
addict reads not to find anything out but merely to get the mild
stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the
suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret.
That this secret is nothing at all and does not really account for
the incidents does not matter to such a reader. He has learned
from his long indulgence how to connive with the author in cheat-
ing: he does not pay any real attention when the disappointing
dteouement occurs, he does not think back and check the events,
he simply closes the book and starts another. This theory is con-
firmed by my own sensations in reading such a novel as, say, Rex
Stout’s The Red Box. I read to the end of the story to find out
what was in the box, but from the moment when I came to realize
that the box was only a bait and that there was nothing astonish-
ing in it, I did not bother with the plot any more but dropped
the book, after I had finished it, without ever making much ef-
fort to figure out what all the fuss had been about.

To detective-story addicts, then, I say; Please do not write me
any more letters telling me that I have not read the right books.
And to the seven correspondents who are with me and who in
some cases have thanked me for helping them to liberate them-
selves from a habit which they recognized as wasteful of time and
degrading to the intelligence but into which they had been

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? 397

bullied by convention and the portentously invoked examples of
Woodrow Wilson and Andr^ Gide — to these staunch and pure
spirits I say: Friends, we represent a minority, but Literature is
on our side. With so many fine books to be read, so much to be
studied and known, there is no need to bore ourselves with this
rubbish. And with the paper shortage pressing on all publication
and many first-rate writers forced out of print, we shall do well
to discourage the squandering of this paper which might be put
to better use.

The Detective Story — Why?
By J^icholas Blake

T^nnnrinsTroinrcTnnnroTnnsTnnnnnnr^^

Nicholas Blake is best known to American readers as a foremost
*'new generation*' English detective story writer^ the author of
such fine novels as The Beast Must Die, and for his poetry pub-
lished under his birth-name^ C. Day Lewis. He has also written
from time to time outstanding criticism of the detection genre,
chiefly for the Spectator. It is to be hoped that his novels and
criticism, both apparently interrupted by the war, will be soon
resumed. The selection which follows is excerpted from Mr.
Blake's introduction to the English edition of the present editor's
Murder For Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story
(London: Davies, 1942); which will explain certain otherwise per-
plexing references.

00 009000 OJOQOOOQOOOO 0 o.iUUUiUliUiU^^

I no not mean, by this, to ask why the detective story came into
existence when it did. That question has been answered suc-
cinctly, if negatively, by Mr. Haycraft — “Clearly, there could be
no detective stories . . . until there were detectives. This did not
occur until the nineteenth century.*' A negative answer, because
it merely re-defines the question: after all, there were no railway
systems, either, until the nineteenth century, but their creation
did not produce any considerable body of literature about engine-
drivers.

Nor do I intend to discuss at length the subsidiary though fas-
cinating problem, “Why do we write detective stories?" Many
solutions, all of them correct, will suggest themselves to the reader.
Because we want to make money. Because the drug addict (and
nearly every detection-writer is an omnivorous reader of crime
fiction) always wants to introduce other people to the habit. Be-

398

The Detective Story — Whyf 399

cause artists have a notorious nostalgic de la boue^ and our own
hygienic, a-moral age offers very little honest mud to revel in ex-
cept the pleasures of imaginary murder. Democratic civilisation
does not encourage us to indulge our instinct for cruelty: the
quite different attitude of the dictatorships towards this, as well
as their different conception of justice, legal evidence and legal
proof, must — as Mr. Haycraft points out — account for the Nazis’
banning of all imported detective-fiction and characterising it as
“pure liberalism” designed to “stuff the heads of German readers
with foreign ideas”: a people whose blood-lust was sublimated
by reading and writing fiction murders would certainly have less
zest for murdering real Poles.

An agreeable monograph might indeed be written on The First
Plunge Into Detective Writing, Gone, alas, are the good old days
when “without an idea in his head and with no previous knowl-
edge of crime or criminals, Leblanc [creator of the great Arsfene
Lupin] took up his pen, and his impudent hero sprang into spon-
taneous being.” So expert and exacting is the detection-fan today
that the detective novelist must possess a good working knowl-
edge of police procedure, law and forensic medicine if he is to
escape severe letters from the public pointing out his errors: (how
many plots, I wonder, have been complicated by the writer’s need
to skirt round some obstacle raised by his technical ignorance?)
From what dark incentive, by what devious and secret psycho-
logical passages have detective writers — timid and law-abiding
persons for the most part, who faint at the sight of blood and
tremble when the eye of a policeman is turned upon them — first
set out upon the sinister paths of crime-fiction?

The question is enthralling. But it must here be subsumed
under my general question: “The Detective Story — ^Why?” Why, I
mean, has the detective story attained such remarkable popularity,
rising — ^as Mr. Haycraft tells us — ^from a ratio of twelve in 1914
to ninety-seven in 1925 and two hundred and seventeen in 1939,
and holding its own even against that most insidious and degraded
of mental recreations, the cross-word puzzle?

We may imagine some James Frazer of the year 2042 discours-
ing on “The Detective Novel — the Folk-Myth of the Twentieth
Century.” He will, I fancy, connect the rise of crime fiction with

Nicholas Blake

400

the decline of religion at the end of the Victorian era. The sense
of guilt, psychologists tell us, is deeply rooted in man and one
of the mainsprings of his actions. Just as, in the primitive tribe,
the idiot or the scapegoat is venerated and the murderer wreathed
with flowers, because he has taken upon himself the guilt of the
community, so in more civilised times one function of religion
is to take the burden of guilt off the individual’s shoulders through
the agency of some Divine or apotheosised Being. When a religion
has lost its hold upon men’s hearts, they must have some other
outlet for the sense of guilu

This, our anthropologist of the year 2042 may argue, was pro-
vided for us by crime-fiction. He will call attention to the pattern
of the detective-novel, as highly formalised as that of a religious
ritual, with its initial necessary sin (the murder), its victim, its
high priest (the criminal) who must in turn be destroyed by a
yet higher power (the detective). He will conjecture — and rightly
— that the devotee identified himself both with the detective and
the murderer, representing the light and the dark sides of his
own nature. He will note a significant parallel between the for-
malised denouement of the detective novel and the Christian con-
cept of the Day of Judgment when, with a flourish of trumpets,
the mystery is made plain and the goats are separated from the
sheep.

Nor is this all. The figure of the detective himself will be ex-
haustively analysed. Our anthropologist, having studied Mr. Hay-
craft’s work, will have been informed that many readers of crime
fiction remembered the name of the detective but not of the book
or its author. Sherlock Holmes, Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot
were evidently figures of supernatural importance to the reader:
and to the writer, for their creators bodied them out with a loving
veneration which suggested that the Father Imago was at work.
The detective is, indeed — to change the metaphor — the Fairy
Godmother of the twentieth century folk-myth, his magic capa-
bilities only modified to the requirements of a would-be scientific
and rational generation. It will be noted, too, that these semi-
divine figures fell into two categories. On the one hand was the
more primitive, the anthropomorphised type — Holmes and Wim-
sey its most celebrated examples — ^in which human frailty and

The Detective Story — Why? 401

eccentricity, together with superhuman powers of perception, are
carried to a supralogical conclusion. On the other hand there was
the so-to-speak modernist detective — ^generally a policeman rather
than an amateur — a figure stripped of human attributes, an in-
strument of pure reason and justice, the Logos of the detective
world.

Such may well be, in brief, the theory advanced by posterity
to account for the extraordinary hold which the detective novel
possessed on the twentieth-century mind. It would be difficult,
at any rate, to explain the popularity of a so fantastic offshoot
of literature without reference to some fundamental instinct in
mankind.

But the general lines of such an inquiry have not been suffi-
ciently adumbrated if they do not include the minor curiosity
of class-bias in crime fiction. It is an established fact that the
detective-novel proper is read almost exclusively by the upper
and professional classes. The so-called “lower-middle” and “work-
ing” classes tend to read “bloods,” thrillers. Now this is not simply
a matter of literary standards, though the modern thriller is gen-
erally much below the detective story in sophistication and style.
When we compare these two kinds of crime fiction, we cannot
fail to notice that, whereas in the detective novel the criminal is
almost invariably a squalid creature of irremediably flagitious
tendencies, the criminal of the thriller is often its hero and nearly
always a romantic figure.

This is, of course, as Mr. Haycraft has pointed out, a natural
development of the Robin Hood myth. The detective story’s
clientele are relatively prosperous persons, who have a stake in
the social system and must, therefore, even in fantasy, see the
ultimate triumph of their particular social values ensured. It is
significant that even the “thrillers” most popular with the ruling
classes usually represent their hero as being on the side of law
and order — the bourgeois conception of law and order, of course
(that unspeakable public school bully and neurotic exhibitionist,
Bulldog Drummond, is a case in point), or as a reformed criminal
(e.g. Father Brownes right hand man); or, like Arsine Lupin, he
starts as a criminal character but, after a number of anti-social
adventures, gradually goes over to the other side. Not so with

Nicholas Blake

402

the lower ranks of democratic society. Having little or no stake
in the system, they prefer such anarchistic heroes, from Robin
Hood down to the tommy-gun gangster, who have held to ransom
the prosperous and law-abiding. To such readers the policeman
is not the protective figure he appears to your politician, your
stockbroker, your rural dean: for them his aura is menacing, his
baton an offensive weapon rather than a defensive symbol: and
therefore the roman policier does not give them much of a kick.

The guilt-motive perhaps operates here too. On the whole, the
working classes have less time and incentive than the relatively
leisured to worry about their consciences. In so far as their lives
are less rich, the taking of life (the detective story’s almost in-
variable subject) will seem to them less significant and horrifying.
They themselves sometimes kill for passion; seldom, unlike their
more fortunately placed brethren, for gain. The general sense of
guilt (which is the reverse or seamy side of social responsibility),
the specific moral problems which tease the more prosperous
classes, affect them less nearly. So, for them, the detective novel
— the fantasy-representation of guilt — ^must have a shallower ap-
peal.

It is the element of fantasy in detective fiction — or rather, the
juxtaposition of fantasy with reality — that gives the genre its
identity* Mr. Haycraft mentions Carolyn Wells’ dictum that “the
detective novel must seem real in the same sense that fairy tales
seem real to children.” By implication, this statement defines very
accurately the boundaries of the detective novel. The fairy tale
does not reach its greatest heights when — ^as in the Irish fairy
stories — ^fantasy is piled on fantasy, but by a judicious blending
of the possible with the impossible. Similarly, in crime fiction,
if we set down unrealistic characters in fantastic situations, we
cross the frontier into the domain of the pure “shocker,” If on
the other hand both our action and our characters are realistic,
we produce fiction of the Francis lies’ type which, as Mr, Hay-
craft rightly points out, does not come within the strict canon of
the detective story.

The detective novelist, then, is left with two alternatives. He
can put unreal characters into realistic situations, or he can put

The Detective Story — Why? 403

realistic characters into fantastic situations. The former method
produces the classical roman policietj of which Freeman Wills
Crofts is perhaps the most able living exponent, where the crime
and the police investigation are conducted on strictly realistic
lines, and the element of fantasy necessary to the detection novel
is achieved by making the characters simple ciphers — formalised
simulacra of men and women, that have no life outside the plot
they serve. To call this type of novel ''mere puzzles’" and decry
it for its "un-lifelike” characters is to misunderstand the whole
paradox of the detective story.

The second alternative, which has produced the at present
most fashionable kind of crime fiction, is to place "real” charac-
ters in unreal, fantastic, or at least improbable situations. This
school of writing covers a wide range. At one extreme we find
such books as John Dickson Carr’s, where the plot possesses the
mad logic and extravagance of a dream, while the dramatis per-
sonae are roughed in with just enough solidity to stand out
against the macabre and whirling background: (Carr’s Dr. Fell,
incidentally, may be coupled with Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe as
the most notable old-style or anthropomorphic detective in con-
temporary fiction — wayward, masterful, infallible). At the other
extreme we get the work of such writers as Ngaio Marsh. Her
Inspector Alleyn, like Michael Innes’ detective, is gentlemanly,
unobtrusive and almost provocatively normal. Her characters
have real body, but derive nothing from textbooks on morbid
psychology. Where the characters are ordinary people and the plot
is neither outre nor melodramatic, one might suppose that the
element of paradox necessary to the detective story would be miss-
ing. But murder is in itself such an abnormal thing that its mere
presence among a number of nice, respectable, civilised charac-
ters will be paradox enough.

It is reasonable to suppose that this — the "novel of manners,”
as Mr. Haycraft calls it — ^will remain a predominant type of de-
tective fiction for some time to come. Cextainly we can be sure
that the general raising of the literary level in the genre has come
to stay. Fresher observation, more careful, realistic handling of
character and situation are demanded today, and the general level
of detective writing is thus improved. But something has been

Nicholas Blake

404

lost in the process. The high fantasy of the old masters cannot
now be achieved. No detective novelist today could allow his
hero to exclaim, in a moment of strong excitement, ‘‘Holdl Have
you some mucilage?’’

Another interesting line of development is in the detective
himself. For some years, the sleuth has been undergoing modifica-
tion — a toning down from the Sherlock Holmes to the Roderick
Alleyn type. Even when, as with Peter Wimsey, his pedigree, fam-
ily background, hobbies and tastes are diligently documented, he
has become a much less far-fetched personality. If this process
continues, we may expect in the future a school of detectives with-
out personality at all. I myself rather fancy the idea of a detec-
tive who shall be as undistinguished as a piece of blotting paper,
absorbing the reactions of his subjects; a shallow mirror, in which
we see reflected every feature of the crime; a pure camera-eye.
Professor Thorndyke and Dr. Priestley are precursors to this
anonymous type. Inspector Maigret is its highest development up
to date.

At first sight Maigret, the most formidable embodiment in
crime fiction of the “stern, unhurrying chase” of Justice, might
seem also the best model for the ambitious writer today. But his
influence may well be disruptive of the detective novel as we know
it. It is not simply that Simenon breaks the rules, by allowing
Maigret to keep so much of his detection-processes under his hat.
The real trouble is Simenon’s deep and unerring sense of evil,
which in practise runs counter to the basic principle of the de-
tective story — that evil must, both for myth-making and entertain-
ment, be volatised by a certain measure of fantasy. In the Maigret
stories, evil hangs over everything, as heavy, as concentrated, as
real as a black fog. It is a raw wine, which must burst the old
bottles. You may remember that remarkable story in which the
criminal is so fascinated by Maigret that he cannot keep away
from him: he is like a moth dashing itself again and again into a
passive flame. Now this exemplifies a proved psychological truth.
As the Greek tragedians knew, crime carries within itself the seed
of retribution; some fatal flaw (or saving grace) in human nature
impels a wrong-doer to betray himself: that is why even the most

The Detective Story — Why? 405

painstaking and cold-blooded murderer is apt to leave a glaring
clue behind, or talk too much one evening in the public bar.

This is all very right and proper in real life. But the traditional
pattern of the detective novel would be disintegrated if writers
emphasised the fact that the criminal does, unconsciously, hunt
himself down. The fictional detective’s occupation would indeed
be gone. Perhaps this is the direction we are to move in. Perhaps
the detective story, as we know it, will be supplanted by the crime
novel. If so, future generations will look back on Simenon and
lies as the fathers of the new genre. It should be some time
though, in any event, before we cease to read murder for pleasure.

Leaves from the Editors’ Notebook
By Ellery Queen

oooooooooooo ou 0 00006 oinnnnnj 0 oou 000000000000006000600

Criticism is not limited to reviews and discussion: it may be his-
torical and factual as welL Some of the finest scholarship of the
latter type in the detection field has been appearing for the last
few years in the lively and learned introductory notes to the
stories published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. At the in-
vitation of your editor, the Messrs, Queen have personally selected
seven of these ''critical commentaries'' — a veritable treasure trove
of mystery miscellany — for reproduction in the present volume.
As almost everyone knows, Ellery Queen (who surely requires no
identification as one of the most outstanding and versatile figures
in the American detective story) is really two men — Frederic Dan-
nay and Manfred B, Lee,

i)! 0 0 0 0 0 0 (LSLSISJJS 9^00 0 0 j)tAo oooooQOOo_9 00(tooo QJliliULfiJUUU

Leaf Number One: The Detective Story, 184^-1861

The first book of detective stories published on this planet was
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales, which appeared in 1845 contained
the great Dupin trilogy. Incredible as it may seem today, Poe’s
experiments in fictional ratiocination fell on deaf ears: they were
not popular with contemporary readers and they failed to impress
contemporary writers. For consider: in the seventeen years that
followed the first edition of Poe’s Tales, not a single book was
published in the United States that contained a detective story!

In the eighteenth year A.P. (After Poe) — in 1863 — two books
finally appeared to crack the long silence. One was Strange Stories
of a Detective: or. Curiosities of Crime, by **a retired member of
the detective police/’ brought out by Dick & Fitzgerald of New
York; the other was The Amber Gods and Other Stories, by Har-

406

Leaves from the Editors* Notebook 407

riet Prescott (Spofford), issued by Ticknor and Fields of Boston,
and containing one detective story called *ln a Cellar/' Two
years later, in 1865, Dick & Fitzgerald published Leaves from the
Note-Book of a New York Detective: The Private Record of /. B,j
written by a Dr. John B. Williams, and containing no less than
exploits of detective James Brampton. This book has barely
survived the years — ^have you ever even heard of sleuth James
Brampton?

Three volumes in 20 yearsi Indeed, it may be said that the de-
tective story was born with Poe and almost died with him.

In London the seed of Poe's noble experiment took firmer root,
sprouted, and bore more abundant fruit. Jolted by the appear-
ance in 1850 of four police articles in Household Words, a maga-
zine edited by Charles Dickens, English writers heard the knock
of Opportunity on their door; for nearly half a century (1850-
1890), they spewed forth a spate of detective ^'reminiscences." As
John Carter has pointed out, most of these so-called real-life
"diaries" were thinly disguised fiction, written by anonymous
and pseudonymous hacks of the day. Immensely popular and lit-
erally read to death, these "revelations" vanished into limbo: less
than half a hundred different titles remain with us. The survivors
include the work of "Waters" (Thomas Russell), Andrew For-
rester, Jr., Charles Martel (Thomas Delf), Alfred Hughes, and a
few others. Rare today and extremely desirable for historical and
collectival reasons, they are nevertheless a purple patch on the
corpus detectivity.

But during the fifties and sixties in the United States there was no
corresponding flood of pseudo "memoirs." Over here the "revela-
tions" were to come later — in our lush Dime Novel Era; the first
Dime Novel detective, Old Sleuth, did not appear until 1872.
From 1845 1862 the American detective story lapsed (to coin

a word) into biblivion. In all those seventeen years not a single
book of detective stories achieved the immortality of cloth, wrap-
pers, or pictorial boards. Occasionally, however, detective short
stories appeared in the many "household" magazines which flour-
ished so romantically in this period. For example, find and read
"The Garnet Ring" by M. Lindsay, in Ballou's Dollar Monthly
Magazine, issue of May 1861. And only after you have thus “re-

4o8 Ellery Queen

discovered’* the past, gone back into those vaunted “good old
days,” will you realize fully how superb in technique, how rich
in imagination, are the offerings of our Hammetts, our Carrs, our
Chestertons, our Christies, our Sayerses, in these “the good new
days.”

Poe, the Great Father of us all, died in 1849. Had he lived long
enough to stumble on one of these “household” horrors, he would
have wept melancholy tears. But if in some celestial cottage Poe
has been following the careers of Uncle Abner, Father Brown,
Sam Spade, Dr. Gideon Fell, and all the others we take too much
for granted, he will not regret having invented what is now the
most fabulous literary form in the history of man’s eternal search
for les mots justes.

Leaf Number Two: B-Change, Rich and Strange

You’ve probably seen movie adventures of the Falcon “based
on the character created by Michael Arlen.” (Some of the screen-
plays were written by our old friends, Stuart Palmer and Craig
Rice.) As a matter of fact, Michael Arlen wrote only one short
story about the Falcon. Thus, from short stories long sagas
grow . • .

One curious point: It is rare indeed for any story, long or short,
to come off the Hollywood assembly line without suffering a B-
change, rich and strange. Michael Arlen’s “Gay Falcon” proved
no exception to the cinematic rule. In the original version. Gay
Falcon is a hardboiled, sardonic detective — not the man, as Mr.
Arlen tells us, “who would have succeeded in politics, where
charm of manner is said to be an advantage.” In the movie “adap-
tations,” Gay Falcon emerges, picture after picture, as a charm-
ing and romantic rogue! Oh, well, life is real, life is earnest . . .

Leaf Number Three: Literary Digest

H. Douglas Thomson, the eminent English detective-story
critic, once wrote that “the short story has been developed and
fostered by modern conditions, by the general acceleration of our
lives . . . with the result that storytelling, like the after-dinner
speaker, is adjured in the name of Providence to be brief.”

Leaves from the Editors^ Notebook 409

The pressure of outside forces to shorten stories is curiously il-
lustrated among certain American magazines. A new literary form
has been widely popularized — the so-called one-shot, or Complete-
Novel-in-One-Issue. From personal experience your Editors know
how a ioo,ooo-word Ellery Queen novel can be cut down to
50,000 words; how the 50,000-word version can be given an even
stronger dose of sodium dinitrophenol, reducing the original full-
length novel to the skin-and-bones of a 25,000-word novelette. If
we agree that the Law-of-Diminishing-Returns is not the prover-
bial immovable body and further, that the Law-of-Approaching-
Zero-as-a-Limit is not an irresistible force, there is no logical rea-
son to disbelieve that a 25,000-word novelette can’t be cut in half
once more, thus transforming a full-blooded novel to an anemic
short story. From that point the condensation to a short-short is
merely another cut-throating by that fearsome weapon, the blue
pencil.

Leaf Number Four: The Quality of Greatness

The ultimate test of a great story is merely this: How long
does it remain in your memory? You may forget the names of the
characters, or where you first read the story, or even the title and
author’s name: those are the superficial details. But if, years and
years later, you still have a vivid recollection of the original im-
pact; if the significance of the story, its point, or its subtle over-
tone, still sticks in a pigeon-hole of your mind, then surely the
story has the quality of greatness.

Leaf Number Five: Literary Unity

Roughly speaking, there are 1000 different books of detective-
crime short stories. These 1000 volumes are divided, like ancient
Gaul, into three parts. About one-third are mixed and general
collections in which some of, most of, or all the stories in each
book concern crime and detection, but not about the same cen-
tral character. About one-half of the 1000 volumes contain stories
wholly unrelated in plot but all revolving, within each book,
around the same protagonist — ^like Reggie Fortune, Axshnt Lupin,
Craig Kennedy, and Dr. Thorndykc- The remaining volumes—

410 Ellery Queen

approximately one-sixth of the total looo — consist of the smaller
subdivisions, including the books of pseudo-real life “memoirs,*’
secret service shorts, parodies and pastiches, anthologies, and so
on.

In the first two parts of modern Gore — five-sixths of all the
detective-crime shorts ever published in book form — the degree of
unity as between the two groups varies. For example, among the
mixed and general collections the only unity in each separate
book lies in the fact that all the stories are written by the same
author and are therefore stamped with a consistent, uniform style.
Occasionally, it is true, the author ties up the stories by using the
Scheherazade method (one person relating all the tales), or the
Decameron approach (various people telling the stories); but these
and similar devices add only a superficial unification at best.

In the second group, the degree of unity is considerably higher.
While in each volume the individual stories are completely dif-
ferent from each other in plot, the presence of a dominating and
continuing central character (like Father Brown, Max Carrados,
or The Old Man in the Corner) binds the heterogeneous stories
into a more cohesive and symmetrical pattern. But rarely, in a
book of detective-crime short stories, does one find a creative
unity greater than that implied by the stock titles — The Adven-
tures of Sam Spade j or The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, or The
Case-Book of Jimmie Lavender.

That is one of the reasons why Agatha Christie’s latest series
of Hercule Poirot short stories has a special and unusual appeal.
It offers a unity of theme that, unlike the mathematical dictum,
is larger than the sum total of the individual parts. Mrs. Christie’s
literary motif was positively inspired. True, it was made feasible
only because the given name of her famous detective is Hercule;
but that fortuitous circumstance in no way lessens the brilliance
of her basic idea. Isn’t Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie must
have asked herself) a modern Hercules? Why not, then, write a
saga of modern Herculean labors in which Hercule Poirot emu-
lates his legendary namesake? And so, Poirot, before retiring from
active practice (we hope not!), decides to accept only twelve more
cases — the Twelve Modern Labors of Hercules.

Each story stems from an ancient Herculean theme, but the

Leaves from the Editors' Notebook 411

symbolism is completely modernized and detectivized. Thus, in
the first “labor’' Poirot captures the lion of Nemea — in the mod-
ern sense, a kidnaped Pekinese; in the sixth “labor” Poirot deals
with the iron-beaked birds of Stymphalus — the modern blackmail-
ers; in the eighth “labor” Poirot tames the wild horses of Diome-
des — the modern drug peddlers; and so on.

If you want an exciting refresher-course in mythology, we rec-
ommend Agatha Christie’s brilliantly conceived Modern Labors
of Hercules,

Leaf Number Six:

'Tec Trademarks

In the field of the detective story comparatively few writers
have capitalized on the advertising advantages and identification
value of a pictorial trademark; and of the few attempts made,
nearly all have failed to achieve their objective — “the shock of
recognition.” For example: most of Edgar Wallace’s books show
somewhere — on the dust wrapper, on the cover, or on the verso
of the half-title — a red circle (black, when inside the book) with
a holograph signature of Wallace slashed across the bottom; but
how many of you associate this trademark with Wallace, or even
remember it at all? In the early days of Ellery Queen, we sported
a small line-cut, usually placed in the lower right-hand corner of
the dust jacket: a drawing of two playing cards (Queens of Dia-
monds) with a detectival dagger transfixing both at the top; but
this piece of juvenilia was quickly abandoned; it didn’t “take”
and we were glad of it. , . . By all odds the most successful 'tec
trademark is the cartoon figure and rakish halo that represent
none other than Simon Templar, The Saint. This seemingly child-
ish picture has charm and sophistication, and effec-
i ? tively identifies the modern Robin Hood of fictional
y felony created by Leslie Charteris. Indeed, it is sur-

j F prising in view of the catchy success of Charteris’s gay

1 little figure that imitative cartoons did not multiply
^ rabbitly among other crimeteers . . . The hallmark
of a partially unfurled umbrella would point to quite a few fic-
tional ferrets — Edgar Wallace’s Mr. J. G. Reeder and Eric Am-
bler’s Dr. Jan Czissar, among others; but in all likelihood you

412 Ellery Queen

would not think o£ them. The homely, humble bumbershoot
seems exclusively the property of Gilbert K. Chesterton’s Fathei
Brown, although no serious attempt has been made by Chester-
ton’s publishers to exploit such a fixed idea ... If you came
upon the likeness of a tweedy deerstalker, you wouldn’t need two
guesses. The device of a deerstalker means only one detective —
Sherlock Holmes. And yet it can be said that for once a ’tec trade-
mark oversold itself, became too successful. Foi
the deerstalker (like the magnifying glass) has
acquired a universal significance: it has come to
identify all detectives in general even more than
Holmes in particular. The criminological cha-
peau illustrated was drawn by the greatest of all
Sherlockian artists, the late Frederic Dorr Steele; it is one of a
group of Hoimesian hats that Mr. Steele sketched especially for
your Editors’ anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes
(1944) . . . It is not generally known that Stuart Palmer, creator
of Hildegarde Withers, also has his armorial bearings, so to speak.
It is a personal symbol of which only his intimates are aware. Mr.
Palmer signs all his letters to your Editors with a more-or-less hast-
ily scrawled '‘Stu,” but when the mood is upon him, he some-
times adds a little pen-and-ink insigne — a cute Disney-like crea-
ture with a sad eye and an air of pathetic loneliness. There are
two poses — plain and fancy — ^as the drawings below reveal. The
source of Stu’s personal trademark is easy to trace: it stems from
his first great success. The Penguin Pool Murder, published by
Brentano’s in 1931- This book was snapped up by Katharine
Brown, then East Coast story editor for RKO, as a vehicle for the
late Edna May Oliver. (The same Katharine Brown, by the
way, who later scooped all
her competitors when she
snapped up Gone With the
Wind.) Edna May Oliver —
and wasn’t she grand as
Hildy? — ^was teamed with
Jimmy Gleason as Inspector
Piper, another happy casting choice. Later, because of Miss Oli-
ver’s fading health, the role of Hildy was assigned to Helen Brod-

Leaves from the Editors' Notebook 413

erick, and then to Zasu Pitts. The trained penguin who appeared
in the first picture was named Oscar, and apparently he won an
eternal niche in Stu’s affections. Stu recalls how Oscar, who had
a tendency to faint under the glare of Klieg lights — temperamen-
tal little actor, that Oscar! — finally had to be given a stand-in.
No, we’re not kidding — this is on the level! The stand-in was a
duck, so help us! The name of the duck is not recorded^ — could
it have been the great Donald himself, incognito, sort of playing
the Caliph of Bagdad in true Hollywood style? There are other
amusing anecdotes of Stuart Palmer’s life among the Aptenodytes
forsteri: for example, when Stu was last in London the keeper of
the penguins at Regent’s Park gave Stu the key to the Zoo, and
Stu (obviously the patron saint of the penguins) spent afternoons
sketching, photographing, and playing games with the big Em-
perors — doing everything, as Stu says, but sitting on an egg, a seden-
tary service seductively suggested by the rotary come-hither of
one lady penguin’s flipperlike wing.

Leaf Number Seven: Detectives' Names

More random speculations on the 1000 books of detective-crime
short stories published since Poe’s tall Tales: a few thoughts on
nomenclature, with particular reference to namesakes:

In a field so comparatively limited, the duplication of a detec-
tive’s surname is naturally rare. There is only one Holmes, one
Fortune, one Thorndyke. When a newcomer faces the problem
of christening a new detective character, he usually avoids the
well-known and famous surnames. It would be odd indeed if a
second Hewitt came upon the modern scene, or a second Car-
rados, or a second Zaleski. And since there is almost an infinite
variety of names to choose from, even the lesser-known patronym-
ics are seldom used by more than one writer.

The exceptions to the rule are few but fascinating. For ex-
ample: there are two short-story detectives named — ^and this is
not a common name by any means — Chetwynd. One is Dr. Chet-
wynd in Mrs. L. T. Meade’s and Robert Eustace’s scarce book,
The Sanctuary Club; the other is Dennis Chetwynd, chronicled
by Henry J. Fidler. There are, allowing for a nationalistic dif-

414 Ellery Queen

ference in spelling, only two Becks — M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Paul
Beck, the Rule of Thumb Detective, and William LeQueux’s
Monsieur Raoul Becq, ex-sous-chef of the Surety Gen^rale of
Paris. There are two sleuths named Barnes, three baptized Bell,
and two who bear the family name of Treadgold.

Even the names of Brown, Jones, and Smith have hardly been
overworked in books of detective shorts. There is only one Brown
— Chesterton’s immortal and doubly unique Father Brown. There
are only two Joneses, excluding parody names of Holmes — Sam-
uel Hopkins Adams’s Average Jones and Bennet Copplestone’s
'‘Cholmondeley Jones.” And of that most ubiquitous (but no less
honored) of all names. Smith, there are only three — R.T.M.
Scott’s Aurelius Smith, James B. Hendryx’s Black John Smith,
and Edgar Wallace’s antidetective, Anthony Smith.

^dOOOOOOOOOQOOOOOO 05 0000 oil 000000000 0

u 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ooooooobotfo'boooo(rooi$ o 1 S^o 00000000 o 1 )od'o

DETECTIVE FICTION

vs.

REAL LIFE

5opooflQ(inoo«(iao9(ii)oojft,pop(iiflpo«(tAoj|j»jiooAHfljij_(isJ)

<^000000 <L0 0 0 (LO q 0 0 o o q pji opooooooooooooj^oo o p o pjg .

From the Memoirs of a Private Detective
By Dashiell Hammett

FbOOOdOOO 0 0 0d0000000000 0l3 00000000 0 0 00000 0l) 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 o'

Dashiell Hammett is one of the few living detective story writers
to whom the word great may be applied without fear of serious
contradiction. As the writer who symbolizes the American ''hard-
boiled'' school in the public mind (whether or not he was the sole
founder of that school) he has influenced and changed the detec-
tive story more radically than any other single author since Doyle,
One of the reasons for the force and validity of The Maltese Fal-
con, The Glass Key, and the "Continental Op" stories is found in
Hammett's own eight years' experience as a Pinkerton detective.
Here are his reminiscences of those years, as he told them in the
old Mencken-Nathan Smart Set for March ig2^ — just about the
time (see Erie Stanley Gardner in this volume) that he was be-
ginning to publish his first detective fiction in Black Mask maga-
zine,

JR p Q 0 0 0 _0 0_ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 Q 0 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 P 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q 0 p 0 0 0 0 Q 0 0 OJU

Wishing to get some information from members of the W.C.T.U.
in an Oregon city, I introduced myself as the secretary of the
Butte Civic Purity League, One of them read me a long discourse
on the erotic effects of cigarettes upon young girls. Subsequent ex-
periments proved this trip worthless.

A man whom I was shadowing went out into the country for
a walk one Sunday afternoon and lost his bearings completely. I
had to direct him back to the city.

417

4i8

Dashiell Hammett

House burglary is probably the poorest paid trade in the world;
I have never known anyone to make a living at it. But for that
matter few criminals of any class are self-supporting unless they
toil at something legitimate between times. Most of them, how-
ever, live on their women.

I know an operative who while looking for pickpockets at the
Havre de Grace race track had his wallet stolen. He later became
an official in an Eastern detective agency.

Three times I have been mistaken for a Prohibition agent, but
never had any trouble clearing myself.

Taking a prisoner from a ranch near Gilt Edge, Mont., to
Lewistown one night, my machine broke down and we had to
sit there until daylight. The prisoner, who stoutly affirmed his
innocence, was clothed only in overalls and shirt. After shivering
all night on the front seat his morale was low, and I had no diiGS-
culty in getting a complete confession from him while walking
to the nearest ranch early the following morning.

Of all the men embezzling from their employers with whom I
have had contact, I can’t remember a dozen who smoked, drank,
or had any of the vices in which bonding companies are so inter-
ested.

I was once falsely accused of perjury and had to perjure myself
to escape zrxut

From the Memoirs of a Private Detective 419

A detective agency official in San Francisco once substituted
‘‘truthfuF’ for “voracious” in one of my reports on the ground
that the client might not understand the latter. A few days later
in another report “simulate” became “quicken” for the same rea-
son.

Of all the nationalities haled into the criminal courts, the Greek
is the most difficult to convict. He simply denies everything, no
matter how conclusive the proof may be; and nothing so im-
presses a jury as a bare statement of fact, regardless of the fact’s
inherent improbability or obvious absurdity in the face of over-
whelming contrary evidence.

I know a man who will forge the impressions of any set of
fingers in the world for I50.

I have never known a man capable of turning out first-rate
work in a trade, a profession or an art, who was a professional
criminal.

I know a detective who once attempted to disguise himself
thoroughly. The first policeman he met took him into custody.

I know a deputy sheriff in Montana who, approaching the cabin
of a homesteader for whose arrest he had a warrant, was confronted
by the homesteader with a rifle in his hands. The deputy sheriff
drew his revolver and tried to shoot over the homesteader's head
to frighten him. The range was long and a strong wind was blow-
ir^. The bullet knocked the rifle from the homesteader’s hands.

Dashiell Hammett

4 , 2,0

As time went by the deputy sheriff came to accept as the truth
the reputation for expertness that this incident gave him, and
he not only let his friends enter him in a shooting contest, but
wagered everything he owned upon his skill. When the contest
was held he missed the target completely with all six shots.

Once in Seattle the wife of a fugitive swindler offered to sell
me a photograph of her husband for $15. I knew where I could
get one free, so I didn’t buy it.

I was once engaged to discharge a woman’s housekeeper.

The slang in use among criminals is for the most part a con-
scious, artificial growth, designed more to confuse outsiders than
for any other purpose, but sometimes it is singularly expressive;
for instance, two-time loser — one who has been convicted twice;
and the older gone to read and write — found it advisable to go
away for a while.

Pocket-picking is the easiest to master of all the criminal trades.
Anyone who is not crippled can become an adept in a day.

In 1917, in Washington, D.C., I met a young woman who did
not remark that my work must be very interesting.

Even where the criminal makes no attempts to efface the prints
of his fingers, but leaves them ail over the scene of the crime,
the chances are about one in ten 'of finding a print that is suffi-
ciently clear to be of any value.

From the Memoirs of a Private Detective

421

The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a descrip-
tion of a man, complete even to a mole on his neck, but neglected
to mention that he had only one arm.

I know a forger who left his wife because she had learned to
smoke cigarettes while he was serving a term in prison.

Second only to “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” is “RafHes” in the
affections of the daily press. The phrase “gentleman crook” is
used on the slightest provocation. A composite portrait of the
gentry upon whom the newspapers have bestowed this title would
show a laudanum-drinker, with a large rhinestone horseshoe aglow
in the soiled bosom of his shirt below a bow tie, leering at his
victim, and saying: “Now don’t get scared, lady, I ain’t gonna
crack you on the bean. I ain’t a rough neck!”

The cleverest and most uniformly successful detective I have
ever known is extremely myopic.

Going from the larger cities out into the remote rural com-
munities, one finds a steadily decreasing percentage of crimes
that have to do with money and a proportionate increase in the
frequency of sex as a criminal motive.

While trying to peer into the upper story of a roadhouse in
northern California one night — ^and the man I was looking for
was in Seattle at the time — part of the porch roof crumbled under
me and I fell, spraining an ankle. The proprietor of the road-
house gave me water to bathe it in.

422

Dashiell Hammett

The chief difference between the exceptionally knotty prob-
lem confronting the detective of fiction and that facing a real de-
tective is that in the former there is usually a paucity of clues^
and in the latter altogether too many.

I know a man who once stole a Ferris-wheel.

That the law-breaker is invariably soon or late apprehended is
probably the least challenged of extant myths. And yet the files
of every detective bureau bulge with the records of unsolved mys-
teries and uncaught criminals.

Inquest on Detective Stories
By R. Philmore

0 0000000 0 0 0 (To 0 0 0 0 0 0 o'?) OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO 0 0 0 oooo<^ooo'

R, Philmore is a pseudonymous English detective story writer
whose novels are well regarded in his native land, though for some
reason they are too little known in America. In Part I of this orig-
inal and fascinating "‘Inquest/* Mr. Philmore poses the medical
means employed in each of five famous detective novels and Dr.
John Yudkin, English medical specialist, renders scientific verdict
on their real-life plausibility. In Part II, Mr. Philmore, alone,
tests the motives of a number of fictional crimes for psychological
validity. This selection appeared in two installments in the Eng-
lish magazine Discovery for April and September ip^8.

PQ<lfiooQooopoooooQoooooooo5 0Qaopoooooooooo(iooopo(toooj(i

The increase in detective literature has forced writers to look for
odder and odder methods of killing their victims. But they have
not only to be odd: they must be plausible. Some of them make
us ask a lot of questions of our medical friends. Here are five
fairly recent examples of complicated killing — ^which have each
been submitted for Dr. Yudkin's opinion.

Lord Peter’s Bicycle Pump

First of all there is Dorothy Sayers’ Unnatural Death. In this
story we suspect that a woman has killed a number of people; she
had motive enough, and opportunity — only, unfortunately, their
deaths were all put down to heart failure. Lord Peter Wimsey dis-
covers the secret. The , murderer injected an air-bubble into an
artery, and stopped the circulation. Here is Lord Peter’s own de-
scription of the method of death (in conversation with a doctor).

423

R. Philmore

424

*Xook here, the body’s a pumping-engine, isn’t it? The jolly
old heart pumps the blood round the arteries and back through
the veins and so on, doesn’t it? That’s what keeps things working,
what? Round and home again in two minutes — that sort of thing?”

“Certainly.”

“Little valve to let the blood out; ’nother little valve to let it
in — ^just like an internal combustion engine, which it is?”

“Of course.”

“And s’posin’ that stops?”

“You die.”

“Yes. Now, look here. S’posin’ you take a good big hypodermic,
empty, and dig it into one of the big arteries and push the han-
dle — what would happen? What would happen, doctor? You’d
be pumpin’ a big air-bubble into your engine feed, wouldn’t
you? What would become of your circulation, then?”

“It would stop it. . .

“. . . the air-bubble, doctor — in a main artery — say the femoral
or the big vein in the bend of the elbow — that would stop the cir-
culation, wouldn’t it? How soon?”

“Why, at once. The heart would stop beating.”

“And then?”

“You would die.”

“With what symptoms?”

“None to speak of. Just a gasp or two. The lungs would make
a desperate effort to keep things going. Then you’d stop. Like
heart failure. It would be heart failure.”

Now, if one consults medical opinion, one finds some doubts
thrown on the efficacy of this method. Here is the report I had:

{J. Y.) “The presence of air in the blood may cause death in
either of two ways. It may lodge in the blood vessels supplying
the brain, causing death in coma by cutting off the blood supply
to some vital part. Or it may embarrass the action of the heart,
causing heart failure, by creating a froth in the chambers of the
heart with which the heart cannot deal. The entry of air into the
circulation occurs most commonly in operations on the neck. It
may occur, too, during an attempt to inject air into the chest
(pneumothorax) when the needle inadvertently enters a vein.

“In practice, however, death does not commonly occur in these

Inquest on Detective Stories 425

cases. So it is difficult to say whether injection of air into a vein
by means of a syringe will cause death. It would be unlikely with
a hypodermic syringe, which rarely holds more than 2-3 c.c. It
would be more likely — even probable — ^with larger quantities, say
20 c.c.. or more, but I think one could never be certain that the
method would work in any particular instance.

“ (Incidentally, it is difficult to inject into an artery. It would
almost certainly have to be a vein.)''

References

Boyd. Text-book of Pathology.

Romanis and Mitchiner. Science and Practice of Surgery.

The idea is extremely ingenious — but, in fact, it looks as
though the murderer could make certain of killing the victim
only by connecting a bicycle pump with the vein.

Arsenic as a Food

In another of her books Miss Sayers has a much more plausible
method. Strong Poison, the novel which introduces Harriet Vane
— probably the most successful character in detective fiction — has
•a murder by arsenic poisoning. The victim shared an omelette
with the murderer: he died, the murderer survived. Lord Peter
established that the murderer had built up an immunity from
arsenic. Here is his own (again characteristic) description, together
with a medical report.

“Some fellow • . . found that, whereas liquid arsenic was dealt
with by the kidneys and was uncommonly bad for the system,
solid arsenic could be given day by day, a little bigger dose each
time, so that in time the doings — ^what an old lady I knew in
Norfolk called *the tubes' — got used to it and could push it along
H^ithout taking any notice of it, so to speak. I read a book some^
where which said it was all done by leucocytes — those jolly little
white corpuscles, don't you know — ^which sort of got round the
stuff and bustled it along so that it couldn't do any harm. At all
events, the point is that if you go on taking solid arsenic for a
good long time^ — say a year or so — you establish a what-not, an
immunity, and can take six or seven grains at a time without so

JR. Philmore

426

much as a touch of indi-jaggers, . . . Well, it occurred to me,
don't you see, old horse, that if you'd had the bright idea to im-
munize yourself first, you could easily have shared a jolly old
arsenical omelette with a friend. It would kill him and it wouldn't
hurt you."

Q. Y.) ‘"Solid arsenic (As^Og), unlike soluble arsenic com-
pounds, produces well-marked tolerance if taken in small doses
over a long period. It appears that the tolerance (Lord Peter’s
Immunity') is due to the fact that the lining cells of the intestine
become more resistant and consequently less arsenic is absorbed.
I think therefore that it would be quite possible on these lines
to eliminate one's friend by sharing an arsenic omelette with him."

References

Douthwaite, Hale-White's Materia Medica,

Clark. Applied Pharmacology,

JoACHiMOGLU. Archiv fur experimentelle Pathologic und Pharma-
kologie. 79, 419.

Hannasybe anb the Toothpaste

One of the wittiest of detective writers, Georgette Heyer, had
an ingenious poisoning device in her book: Behold Here*s Poison,
An unpleasant head of a family is found to have been poisoned
with nicotine; several relatives with motives had, it appeared, op-
portunities of poisoning various foods, drinks and medicines
which he had taken, but, since nothing of these remained for
analysis, the suspicions of Superintendent Hannasyde were pretty
widely spread. Shortly afterwards an odd, but by no means well-
hated, sister of the victim also died of the same poison. She, how-
ever, left an unfinished tube of toothpaste; it was discovered that
this had also been used by her brother.

Here are Hannasyde's words, followed by the medical com-
ment:

“The nicotine did not pass through the stomach. It was ab-
sorbed through the tissues of the mouth. This is the analyst's re-
port which IVe been waiting for. The medium through which

Inquest on Detective Stories 427

your aunt was poisoned was a tube of toothpaste. . . . The poi-
son was in all probability injected ... by means of a hypodermic
syringe, inserted into the bottom end of the tube, and driven up
a little way through the paste. The paste at the bottom of the
tube is untainted, and it is obvious that the paste at the top end
must also have been free from poison.'*

Q. Y.) ‘*On the whole, the absorptive powers of the 'tissues of
the mouth’ are not greats as witness the fact that many gargles
and mouth washes contain substances which would cause severe
symptoms if swallowed. But it has been shown recently that cer-
tain drugs are quite readily absorbed in the mouth: in particular,
it was found that one drop of nicotine placed on the tongue or
throat of a cat killed it within a few minutes. Since as little as
two or three drops of nicotine when swallowed will kill a man
very rapidly, it is quite possible that a toxic dose would be ab-
sorbed from, say, toothpaste in the mouth. In view, however, of
its very strong tobacco-like taste and smell, one would have to
imagine that the composition of the paste was such as to mask
these properties of nicotine.”

References

Heffter. Handbuch der experimentellen Fharmakologie, ii, 2.

Macht. Journal of the American Medical Association. 110, 409.

H. M. Nearly Baffled

The most amusing of detectives, Sir Henry Merrivale, has one
of his best cases in Red Widow Murders. Here Carter Dickson
gives us a locked, and supposedly deadly room, in which a man
sits to kill a family superstition. The door is watched by several
people, the windows are barred on the inside; yet he dies. The
post mortem shows that he had been poisoned by curare — ^which,
of course, is harmless if swallowed; to be lethal it must be in-
jected into the blood by way of some cut in the skin. No one could
have reached the victim, to inflict such a cut. The problem
Stumped H. M. for some time; but at last he discovered that the
victim had had a gum lanced that day, and had received from the

R, Philmore

428

murderer a flask containing whiskey and (so he was told) a drug
to stop the pain. The flask contained curare. The murderer had
to run a risk in taking away the flask when the body was dis-
covered; but for some time no one thought of looking for a flask,
since no one was concerned with what he had swallowed. This
is how H. M. describes the manner of death:

'1 steered myself wrong from the first; I insisted to myself and
everybody else that the curare could never have been swallowed,
because it wouldn’t have hurt Bender. . . . But what I didn’t
realize, and what nobody else looked for, was a small puncture
in the gum, toward the wisdom teeth, probably, where the gum
is so apt to get infected — a puncture made the afternoon of his
death. Blood-stream! Of course it poured right into the blood-
stream, and killed him quicker than any injection. We look all
over his body, and find absolutely no wound by which you could
shove in the poison; but how are we ever to spot a little thing
like a lanced gum?”

(J. Y.) “Theoretically, it is certainly possible to die when cer-
tain poisons, innocuous when swallowed, are absorbed into the
blood through a cut. I cannot say how likely it is for someone to
have such an amount of curare — an extraordinarily bitter sub-
stance — in his mouth that he might be able to absorb the two or
three grains which would be needed to kill him.”

Inspector Poole’s Mixture

Finally, there is Henry Wade. In his No Friendly Drop we have
the sudden death of a Lord, one of those county figures whom
Wade handles so sympathetically. The murder is a complicated
one; it depends, after the manner of The Mysterious Affair at
Styles, on a combination of substances; but in this case they are
not mixed until they reach the body of the victim. He has taken
chloral tablets (containing a non-lethal dose of di-dial) for neu-
ralgia. Then the murderer puts hyoscine in his morning cup of
tea. Inspector Poole hears the verdict of the police analyst:

“I found di-dial scattered throughout practically the whole of
the digestive tract. . , . In all I estimate there must have been

Inquest on Detective Stories 429

between two and three grains, certainly not more. I should not
regard that as, in itself, a lethal dose, especially to a subject who
had been taking it for some little time. But there was also present
a second poisonous substance, of a different genus but having a
somewhat similar hypnotic effect — ^scolopamine, more generally
known, perhaps, as hyoscine. . . . There’s not much of this stuff,
either, perhaps one forty-eighth of a grain, nearly all in the stom-
ach — ^nothing like a toxic dose. And that is the interesting part
of this case. Here you have two poisonous substances present in
the body, neither of them in sufficient quantity to be toxic, but
combined — deadly.”

(J. Y.) “Certain combinations of drugs are much more potent
than their individual properties would lead one to expect. Such
synergic or potentiating effects are, for example, seen with chloral
and morphine. However, I have not been able to find a definite
statement of the synergic effect of hyoscine and dial. Of course,
the number of known drugs with an hypnotic action is enormous
and the possibilities of combining any two of them is little short
of infinite. But hyoscine is a common drug and so are the bar-
biturates like dial, and I feel that if they had any marked synergic
action, I should have come across a reference to it. But what seems
important is that I cannot find a reference to a case in which a
combination of two such drugs, each in less than the toxic dose,
have actually caused death. I feel here too that if the possibility
existed, it would be important enough to be included in the
standard works on pharmacology and toxicology,”

References

CusHNY. Text-book of Pharmacology^

Meyer und Gottlieb, Experimentelle Pharmakologie,

In this case (as in the artery injection) we have no definite
denial that the suggested method could kill its man: but we have
a distinct note of doubt. All these five murderers sailed near the
wind; all were lucky, in varying degrees, to kill their victims. But
they took the risk, and their creators are plausible.

430

JR. Philmore

Most of the famous murders in real life that one remembers
have been committed for greed or lust or jealousy. Most of the
murders that one does not remember were committed for similar
motives, so the statistics tell us. It is perhaps surprising, at first
sight, that these motives have not usually been the most success-
ful in the hands of writers of detective stories.

The writers of serious fiction have stuck to these motives when
they introduced murder. Some of the best writers have described
Dostoievsky’s Brothers Karamazov as “almost the best detective
story ever written,” as well as probably the greatest novel. Here
the murderer is actuated by greed. So is Raskolnikov in Crime
and Punishment; and his greed is for a comparatively small
amount of money, too. The heroine of The Idiot is murdered by
a jealous lover.

Disadvantages of Standard Motives

But the use of these motives has certain very definite disad-
vantages for the detective writer. As a rule greed, lust and jealousy
are pretty obvious things, and it is diflficult for the writer to con-
ceal his murderer, if that murderer is powerfully actuated by one
of them. Either we know the murderer all along, or, when we
are told his name, we don't believe it. The serious novelist is
concerned to examine the working of a man's mind and the pat-
tern of his motives until they make murder inevitable. The de-
tective writer cannot prove this inevitability without telling us
early on in the book who the subject is.

Some good attempts have been made. The great classic. Mys-
terious Affair at Styles^ is an example of murder for greed. Here
Agatha Christie manages by extraordinarily clever juggling with
clues and devices to hide the lack of clear murderous intent in
her main villain. She has tried to do the same thing again, quite
often. Parhaps her greatest success in this medium was in Peril
at End House, where she contrived to create a murderer who, we
felt at the end, was probably good for anything; but here the

Inquest on Detective Stories 431

motive was more than greed, it had elements of jealousy and re-
venge. Here, again, any doubts we may have felt during our next-
morning reflection as to the psychological state of the murderer
were dispelled by the brilliance of the central detective device.

Murder for greed appears in Have His Carcase — ^perhaps the
best-worked-out of the books of Dorothy Sayers, and one of the
better balanced of them in so far as the powerful influence of
Harriet Vane is there to restrain Lord Peter Wimsey, to whom
she had not yet surrendered — and in Hamlet Revenge!^ that
splendidly written book by Michael Innes. But in both these cases
there is more to it than sheer greed. In the first-named the mur-
derer is concerned to prevent the loss of something he had counted
on; in the second the author almost convinces us that his mur-
derer was ready to commit his crimes for the excitement.

Jealousy and Lust

It is, of course, difiicult to make a clear distinction between
jealousy and lust as motives for murder, since one is not often
present without the other. A number of serious writers have tried
to build up a condition in which a character murders for this
reason. They have not found it easy. Shakespeare’s Othello is
spoilt for many of us by the unconvincing gullibility of its hero.
Moravia’s The Wheel Turns is a recent splendid failure in this
direction. Detective writers have found it even more difficult.
Philip McDonald, in Rope to Spare, has contrived an atmosphere
so intense that we are prepared to believe in his murderer at the
end; but our belief scarcely survives reflection. Ellery Queen’s
masterpiece, Halfway House, is so ingeniously contrived, and the
final solution so neatly thrust on us, that we overlook the fact
that we have not been given much chance to study the murderer
and feel his pulse. The Cask, which is often erroneously regarded
as Freeman Wills Crofts’s greatest book, has a convincing enough
murderer. But he is so convincing that he is the only possible
suspect, and the interest of the reader lies, not in detecting him,
but in uncovering the ingenious tricks by which he has laid sus-
picion on his rival. (Incidentally, it ought to be stated that the

R, Philmore

432

charm of Crofts lies very largely in his style: it is so unpretentious
and so naturalistic that most of us not only enjoy reading it: we
patronize the writer, saying that he does very well without any
literary gifts.)

Academic Motives

Several writers have tried to escape from the difficulty of hand-
ling the greed or lust-jealousy motive by inventing somewhat re-
mote motives for their murderers. We have had several murders
for altruistic motives. The master of this type is Anthony Berke-
ley, whose wit and graces are sufficient to make up for shakiness
of motive and, sometimes, lack of straight detection. In Second
Shot he gives us a brilliant essay in this kind of thing. In Jump-
ing Jenny he does it again — except that here he adopts the su-
premely cunning device of pretending to reveal his murderer at
the time of the murder. (This is done with one of the most eflEec-
tive colons in literature.) In Trial and Error he makes most of
us believe that he is doing it again. Ellery Queen has a precious
nearly altruistic murder in Spanish Cape: here the sheer grandeur
of the main device is so powerful that we are too grateful to pick
holes in the character of the murderer. Nicholas Blake, in A Ques-
tion of Proof, writes so brilliantly that he almost convinces us that
a man could murder for sheer hate; but it would not be wise for
a lesser artist to try to copy him.

Revenge

Murder for revenge is usually pretty effective in detective fic-
tion. Here the convincing note is usually provided by making
the victim so odious that, as we read, we all want to kill him; so
that, when someone in fact does the trick for us, we don*t stop
to question whether our murderous feelings could in life have
been translated into action. Everyone hates a blackmailer; every-
one sympathizes with the amiable murderers in Austin Freeman's
Mr. Pottermack's Oversight and Georgette Heyer's Behold Here's
Poison — two fascinating books. Here, of course, there is the addi-
tional motive of stopping the blackmailer from blackmailing.
Sheer revenge seems a perfectly adequate motive for the murderer

Inquest on Detective Stories 433

in Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, because we all hate
motoring murderers. Similarly, the world’s horror at kidnapping
was capitalized by Agatha Christie in her delightful Murder on
the Orient Express — a book which, if it is not her best detective
story, is certainly Poirot’s best and most charming appearance.
But, to my mind, the best exploitation of this kind of motive ap-
pears in Carter Dickson’s Plague Court Murders, which must be
put on a list of the dozen best detective stories ever written. Here
the motive is revenge, so to speak, for something which has not
yet been done — the murder of the murderer. The “atmosphere”
is slightly bogus: but it works. Of course, H. M. is so much the
best detective that, once having invented him, his creator could
get away with almost any plot. In fact he doesn’t try to. Inci-
dentally, the method of killing employed in this book is unusual
and ingenious: the victim is shot with pellets of rock-salt to give
the impression that he was stabbed. I must remember to consult
my friend Dr. Yudkin as to its feasibility.

Unconvincing Motives

Some writers — a good many of them eminent ones — have been
thrown back on what seem to me quite inadequate and uncon-
vincing motives for murder. After all, murder is an unusual ac-
tivity. We can imagine a professional revolutionary or a neurotic
gangster killing without much thought; but when a normal citi-
zen murders in these days it is usually under some terrific com-
puli|ion (even though the compulsion may not be evident to the
casual observer, and no novelist, not even so humble a craftsman
as the detective writer, can be a casual observer). I can’t believe
in Dorothy Sayers’s murderer in Busman*s Honeymoon. Both the
gain and the chances of gain were so small for any but a most
abnormal murderer: and this one gives precious little hint of
abnormality. (But then, the chief detective interest in this book
is not so much in who did the murder as in what Lord Peter and
Lady Peter were up to in that bedroom.) Much as I enjoy Philip
MacDonald’s writing, I can’t accept most of his alleged motives
for murder. I don’t believe that his film favourite in The Crime
Conductor would kill a man who had a slight control over his

jR. Philmore

434

actions, nor that his eminent statesman in The Rasp would kill
another eminent statesman because he was slightly more eminent.
I have to confess that my admired Agatha Christie sometimes tries
to bamboozle me into accepting an unreal motive for murder. I
refuse to believe that her famous actor in Three- Act Tragedy
would commit a murder merely as a rehearsal for another mur-
der (which in itself was scarcely believable). Nicholas Blake’s
Thou Shell of Death is an exciting and brilliantly written affair:
but the very skill with which the writer builds up the semi-heroic
figure of his hero makes me refuse to consider him as the despica-
ble murderer he is finally revealed to be. I seldom believe in the
motives supplied for his murders by S. S. Van Dine; I could be
induced to believe, for instance, that some human beings might
try to run through a whole household, but certainly not the al-
leged culprit in the Greene Murder Case. And, while on the whole
I must choose Ellery Queen as my favourite detective writer, I
am afraid I raise my eyebrows at some of his motives. I am not
convinced that anyone would murder so widely for revenge and
petty gain as did his villain in The Egyptian Cross Mystery^ nor
that his unpretentious little criminal in The Chinese Orange Mys-
tery would kill a complete stranger for such doubtful gain.

Murder because of the Past

On the whole the safest line to take is to make your murderer
afraid of exposure. We can believe that most men, if they have
done something really guilty, will kill to hide its coming to light.
Perhaps we believe it too easily; it may be because everyone has
a shame or a streak of guilt in him, so that threat of revelation
strikes a responsive chord, (Murder for gain doesn’t do this. How
many of us hate the rich profiteers we know strongly enough to
dream of killing them?) And there is an advantage for the writer
in this kind of motive, since he has two mysteries to hang over
us; who did the murder? what was there in his past? Most of the
very best murders in detective fiction have been committed for
this reason. I suppose the best judges will without undue anger
allow me to mark Dickson Carr’s Arabian Nights* Murder as the
best detective story ever written. Here the motive (though com

Inquest on Detective Stories 435

taining elements of revenge) is chiefly to hide the fact that a fam-
ily has been disgraced by an unfortunate liaison: and we are
shown enough of the murderer to believe he had it in him. In
House of the Arrow and Murder of Roger Ackroyd there is the
same motive, fear of exposure of blackmailing; and, although
neither A. E. W. Mason nor Agatha Christie keeps to the strict
known rules, few would regard these two books as other than
masterpieces. In Cards on the Table j an even better Agatha Chris-
tie book, we have a murder committed for fear of exposure of
another murder. In that extraordinarily exciting work. Give Me
Deaths Isobel Briggs Myers makes an American commit murder
to prevent his negroid ancestry being exposed, and Philip Mac-
Donald’s best book. The Noose, is that in which his murderer
has the best motive — ^fear of being exposed as a coward and a cheat
— so that here the combination of MacDonald’s style and charac-
terization with a really convincing motive makes one of the books
we must all put on our favourite shelf.

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction
By John Barker Waite

The real-life legal validity of fictional police procedure has long
been a moot subject. Here is a valuable case-study of the problem
by qualified authority. Professor Waite ^ long a member of the
law faculty of the University of Michigan^ is also well known as
the author of several standard works on jurisprudence and as a
contributor to both legal and general magazines. His present
article^ prepared in collaboration with Miles W, Kimball^ ap-
peared in the American Bookman for August ip2p.

Valid as are the points established by Professor Waiie^ it is no
more than fair to point out that his article expresses essentially
a specialist's viewpoint. While a small if usually vocal number
of lay devotees of detective fiction insist on rigid fidelity to real
life in all respects^ the large majority of readers are content if
their mystery fare measures up to the dictum of the late^ well-
loved Carolyn Wells: the detective story must seem real to the
reader in the same sense that fairy tales seem real to children.
Nonetheless^ careful craftsmen have long known that judicious
deference to the actualities is of first importance in achieving this
needed ''sense of verisimilitude/* No detective story ever suffered
from a little extra effort by the author in this respect,

siiuuLajuiiisuuiiuisu^^

It is an easy matter to convict a murderer — ^in books! The writer
of mystery stories has only to set his dauntless detective spinning
analyses and collecting evidence, and the culprit is inevitably led
repining to the death cell

The chief reason justice is so much better served in fiction than
in reality is that the mythical detective enjoys enormous advan-
tages over actual investigators. The storybook hero can get his man

436

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction 437

by all manner of devices prohibited in real life — from breaking-
and-entering to conniving with United States postal officials to
rob the mails. Detective novels are few in which the protagonist
does not accomplish some brilliant stroke in flagrant violation of
the law. Furthermore, when it comes to trying the prisoner on
the strength of the evidence the usual detective collects to sup-
port his brilliant hypotheses, what looks so invulnerable in print
would make him a laughing-stock if introduced in an actual court
of justice.

Not, of course, that it would be unreal to write about arrests
which did not result in convictions. Police reports tabulate a
large proportion of criminal homicides as “cleared by arrest”
when nothing has happened but the arrest of a suspect charged
with a particular crime. He may be in no danger of conviction.
Often the arrest has been made for no better reason than that
the police want to still a clamorous and embarrassing press. On
the great majority of such occasions the available evidence is wholly
inadequate to convince a trial jury or even to gain a hearing
of the state’s case. Detective fiction, in this regard, is most life-
like: where it departs from reality is in the author’s naive
assurance that the suspect was actually and in due form con-
victed.

Mr. J. S. Fletcher, who is himself a lawyer, must have realized
the inherent weakness of his case in The Strange Case of Mr,
Henry Marchmont, for he does not assert that the accused was
ultimately punished, but merely that he was arrested and led
away protesting. And good reason he had to protestl

It will be recalled that in this tale Marchmont had been shot
in the back while ascending the stairs in his own home, and that
coincidentally with his death, bank notes to the amount of one
hundred thousand dollars were stolen from an upstairs room. No
less than six persons had strong reason to desire Marchmont’s
death:

[" Whose real identity Marchmont had dis-
covered and was threatening to reveal, to
the ruin of a business coup Landsdale was
about to execute.

John Landsdale . . , . J

John Barker Waite

Who with Landsdale was interested in the
deal.

Who also stood to profit if the negotiations
were successful^ and who were in sore need
of money.

Marchmonfs clerks to whom would go a
fifty^thousand-dollar legacy upon March-
monfs death.

Half-mad enemy of Landsdale^ who might
have committed the murder in the belief
that Marchmont was Landsdale.

Each of these six persons had had opportunity to fire the fatal
shot. Moreover, all of them except Vandelius could be proved to
have been at the scene of the murder at about the time the tragedy
occurred. Considering all the evidence described in the book, the
most plausibly guilty was Garner. It is true that after he had been
plunged to his death from the rotten bridge in his attempt to
escape pursuers, a letter was found on his person which attempted
to divert suspicion to Vandelius and Cora Sanderthwaite; in it
Garner admitted the theft of a few gold coins but denied guilt of
the murder, declaring he had seen Cora outside the Marchmont
home at the time of the crime, and that he had observed Vande-
lius leaving the house immediately afterward.

This letter, however, would not have been admitted as evidence
against either Vandelius or Cora by any court of law in England
or America. Neither as a matter of strict law nor of common
sense could such a document be properly used: it was a self-
serving declaration by a man who had every reason to direct sus-
picion away from himself. Whereas his letter was self-incrimina-
tory of larceny, such an admission might have been made solely
to lend verisimilitude to his denial of the major crime. It is even
possible that he mistook Cora and Vandelius; it happens fre-
quently that an honest witness admits his own error of identifi-
cation when forced by cross-examination into an analysis of the
situation. It is for such reasons that our constitutions give every
man on trial for crime the right to demand confrontation by the

438

Vandelius

Granch and Garner

Simpson

Cora Sanderthwaite

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction 439

witnesses against him. There is no question that the letter would
have been kept out.

There was, indeed, nothing at all to negative Garner’s probable
guilt. Any fairly intelligent police officer would have charged him
with the crime.

As to Vandelius there was no evidence at all, save the fact that
his visiting card was on the card-tray in Marchmont’s living room.
And yet, out of all these possibilities, and with the imposing ar-
ray of facts against Garner, it was Vandelius who was arrested as
the murderer! The case against him consisted almost entirely of
speculations as to how he might have committed the crime. Mr.
Fletcher showed his acquaintance with realities in ending his story
with the mere fact of Vandelius’s arrest. In real life, Vandelius
would have been freed at once. No English or American examin-
ing magistrate will even hold a suspect for trial simply because
he could have committed a crime, without any evidence that he
did commit it — especially when there is cogent evidence that an-
other person is more likely to have done it. Had Vandelius by
some chance been put on trial, no jury would have convicted; or,
had the unprecedented happened, the Appellate Court would
have reversed the conviction for lack of evidence. It was only a
few months ago that the Illinois Supreme Court reversed a con-
viction of the notorious Shelton brothers with the statement
that ‘'a conviction of crime cannot rest upon probabilities alone,
but the proof must be sufficient to remove all reasonable doubt
that the defendant, and not somebody else, committed the crime,
and it is not incumbent on the defendant to prove who did com-
mit it.”

In The Room with the Tassels ^ Carolyn Wells is not so careful
as Mr. Fletcher. She goes further and states that her suspect was
arrested “and received his just deserts.” If by this statement Miss
Wells means to imply that John Tracy was convicted of mur-
der, she is somewhat in error. There is no evidence presented that
Tracy committed the murders. True, he might have done so, but
it is ridiculous to suppose that he was guilty merely because no
other person was proved guilty. It is well-settled law that the state

♦ People V. O'Hara, lUinois, 1928, 163 N. E, 804.

440

John Barker Waite

must prove affirmatively; the accused is under no obligation to
prove himself innocent; innocence is presumed until the contrary
is demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt.

The confession of Rudolph Braye that he hired Tracy to com-
mit the crime would be excluded from any Anglo-American court
as unreliable, hearsay evidence. This is not a mere legal technical-
ity operating to the defeat of justice: the point is that the detec-
tives’ plausible theories of guilt are in no way facts proving guilt.
No actual court will convict a defendant solely on another man’s
guesses. The Tracy case, had it been real, would have been an-
other murder “cleared by arrest,” but with no subsequent convic-
tion.

The real trial of the Reverend Mr. Avery * for the murder of
Sarah Cornell instances what actually happens in such cases. Avery
had reason to desire Sarah’s death. She had left in her bag a note
suggesting that “if she should be missing,” he could explain it.
And the killing was under such circumstances that he could have
committed it. Avery insisted that he was miles away from the
scene at the time of the crime, but he had not a single witness
to corroborate him. The state, on the other hand, asserted as
positively that Avery was present and that his alibi was wholly
fictive. Like Avery, the state had no witnesses to prove his pres-
ence. Although the general public was convinced of Avery’s guilt,
the jury, hearing no affirmative proof of guilt, was constrained to
bring in a verdict of acquittal.

It is trite law not only that every fact adduced as circumstantial
evidence must be affirmatively demonstrated and that the facts as
a whole must be consistent with the defendant’s guilt, but also
that the circumstances pointing to his guilt must be inconsistent
with the guilt of anyone else.

In The Greene Murder Case, therefore, Mr. Van Bine’s
thoughtfulness in allowing Ada to commit suicide saved the Dis-
trict Attorney considerable embarrassment. Ada could not pos-
sibly have been convicted on the irritating Mr. Vance’s belief in
her guilt. An acquittal would have been inevitable, much to the
chagrin of the doughty sergeant and the harassed District Attor-

Edmund Pearson: Murder at Smutty Nose,

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction 441

ney, whose lawful functions, as a matter of common knowledge,
really have nothing to do with detective work.

Perhaps the known facts in that case — ^which, as known facts,
were surprisingly few — were consistent with Ada’s guilt. She
might have concocted all the improbabilities of which Vance ac-
cused her, but it is incredible that an American jury would have
believed that she did. Further, all the known facts consistent with
Ada’s guilt point with equal logic to Sibella’s guilt. Vance’s the-
ories are wholly a priori.

This by no means exhausts the detective stories in which evi-
dence against the alleged murderer is entirely too sketchy and
fantastic to gain a conviction outside the covers of a book. In a
vast number of such fictions the authors seem more intent upon
dramatic “surprise endings” than upon logical construction of
legal evidence. And if the detective of fiction enjoys an altogether
unnatural latitude in the matter of making arrests merely on his
own theorizing, so is he allowed startlingly illegal modi operandi.

The charming young assistant District Attorney in Earl Derr
Biggers’s tale. Behind That Curtain, uses a technique unavailable
to officials in the flesh. When Grace Lane suddenly disappears and
the police are at a loss, Miss Morrow casually observes, “Grace
Lane was an old friend of Mrs. Tupper-Brock, which may mean
that Grace Lane will write to her from wherever she is hiding.
I am going to make immediate arrangements with the postal au-
thorities. Mrs. Tupper-Brock’s mail will reach her through my
office from now on.” Mr. Biggers naively permits the postal offi-
cials to enter into this impossible agreementl Even a mere man,
Hercule Poirot, in Agatha Christie’s The Mystery of the Blue
Train, accomplishes much the same feat.

Every school boy should know that such a conception is totally
absurd — ^not only as a matter of formal law, but even as an extra-
legal practice. The prosecuting attorney of a populous county
notorious for its crime, where social safety demands the use of
every available weapon and where certain co-operative informali-
ties of legal procedure might seem justifiable, has averred that
such arrangements as Mr. Biggers and Miss Christie describe are
absolutely unheard of. The only means by which the police can

442

John Barker Waite

secure a piece of mail is by a warrant accurately describing the
specific letter in question. It is inconceivable that the postal au*-
thorities would' regularly deliver a suspect’s mail to the prosecu-
tor’s office.

Another advantage accruing to Active detectives and denied
the actual police is the absence of restriction in securing evidence.
This, however, does not necessarily redound to the discredit of the
authors of such stories, since in many cases the heroes are amateur
rather than official investigators. A legal limitation which in a
score of American jurisdictions restricts the activity of detectives
in government employ does not hamper those who are not so
employed. Hence, if the investigator in the story is, like Sherlock
Holmes, or Philo Vance, or Charlie Chan (acting unofficially and
out of his jurisdiction) a mere private citizen, he may legitimately
do much that would be futile as well as illegal if attempted by a
government operative.

Because this limitation exists in some states and not in others,
a detective story may be basically inaccurate if laid in one setting,
while quite real if the action transpires in a different state, or in
England, where police-detectives have much greater freedom in
the methods by which they may obtain evidence. For instance,
H, C. Bailey’s short tale of ‘‘The Little House” would have been
fantastic had the locale been Chicago or Detroit instead of Lon-
don. It will be remembered that in this yarn a neighbor’s denial
that a kitten had entered her premises struck amateur detective,
Reggie Fortune, as being so peculiar that he and a police officer
disguised themselves as water inspectors and searched the neigh-
bor’s house. The criminal evidence they found during this visit
could never have been introduced in most American courts, and
there is some reason to believe that even in England this visit of
the ^‘inspectors” would have been held actually unlawful because
“unreasonable,” In any event, the eventualities would have proved
disastrous to the state’s case in the majority of jurisdictions in
this country; when the defendants were formally charged, preced-
ing the trial, their attorney would have moved the court for an
order suppressing all evidence secured cither through the visit of
the pseudo-inspectors or by means of any later activities under a
search warrant And the order would have been granted.

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction 443

The explanation is brief. Practically all of our constitutions de-
clare that the persons, houses, papers and possessions of the peo-
ple shall be secure against ^'unreasonable” search and seizure.
The Supreme Court has said that search of a private house can
never be reasonable unless made under the authority of a properly
issued search warrant describing the place to be searched and the
thing sought, or in connection with an actual arrest therein. More-
over, an unreasonable search does not necessitate force; it may
be made by stealth, or through deceit. On this theory of the
courts, therefore, the visit of Fortune and the police officer was
an unreasonable search. Granting the premise that it was unrea-
sonable because made without a warrant, it was undeniably a
search.

The judicial reasoning is that if a police officer can use evi-
dence of crime secured by unreasonable search, he will make such
searches in his zeal to secure convicting evidence. The courts fear
that even risk of legal consequences to himself will not deter
him; hence, they have removed the incentive to unreasonable
searches by refusing to recognize evidence secured thereby. Long
ago the Supreme Court laid down the dictum that to make ef-
fective the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable search,
it was incumbent on the courts to prohibit society from utilizing
any evidence so obtained. The state courts, in the beginning, were
inclined to disagree; they followed the older precedent that al-
though the searcher himself might be liable to punishment, never-
theless, the criminal could not gain by the searcher’s over-zeal.
But of recent years a certain fear of their own police has led many
state courts to adopt the Federal rule. In these particular states,
therefore, society could have availed nothing from what the
"water inspectors” learned. And, as the later-secured search war-
rant was issued on the strength of this unreasonably secured in-
formation, it, too, was illegal and the search which it purported
to authorize was also unreasonable.

Now, had Reggie Fortune gone alone on his visit of inspection,
or had he taken with him another amateur as assistant, instead
of an official police investigator, the evidence might have been
used even in our own courts. The search, obviously, would not
have been more reasonable, but the rule of exclusion applies only

444 John Barker Waite

to evidence unreasonably secured by government agents. Fiction
detectives who dispense with active official police co-operation are
therefore an asset to the author in this respect. They remove, at
least, a large part of the risk of writing bad law.

Likewise is an author fortunate in his freedom to elect where
the crime shall be committed. Had Mr. A. E. W. Mason not set
The House of the Arrow in France, detective Hanaud’s foresight
and effort would have proved quite futile. All his proof, one re-
members, came from what he learned by secret and unauthorized
search of the suspect’s house. Had the law of his country necessi-
tated his having a search warrant to make that evidence usable, it
is more than probable that he would have found no evidence to
be used, since, as it later developed, the private secretary to the
Commissaire of Police was a member of the gang and was shrewd
enough to have all incriminating evidence removed after Han-
aud’s request for a warrant. Hence, this entire story hinges upon
the legality of the detective’s unauthorized search; that the book
is accurate is due to the fact that its locale is France, rather than
America.

In The Fellowship of the Frog, Mr. Edgar Wallace, the author,
allows the police to use a detectaphone for purposes of overhear-
ing the conversation of persons under suspicion. Real policemen
are not permitted facilitation of their objective by such means, in
United States courts. The decision of the Supreme Court in the
case of the notorious Olmstead conspiracy has laid the seal of
official disapproval on such techniques.

The Olmstead organization was engaged in large-scale boot-
legging. Olmstead, with a dozen or so associates, had put up a
capital of twenty thousand dollars, and he and his colleagues were
grossing over two million dollars annually. They operated a fleet
of boats, including two sea-going vessels, had innumerable auto-
mobiles and trucks, owned an underground cache outside the city
and various storage stations within the municipal limits, and em-
ployed a horde of scouts, salesmen, drivers, boatmen, clerks, tele-
phone operators, bookkeepers and attorneys. The organization
was as close an approach to the Fellowship of the Frog as reality
is likely to come.

Efforts of the police to break up this ring consistently failed.

The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fiction 445

An occasional minion of the trust was picked up now and then,
assessed his small fine and allowed his freedom. But the big frogs
remained elusive. In time, however, the police got wind of who
the chiefs were. By means of tapping telephone wires, running
from the headquarters of the gang to the homes of four of the
leaders, the police were able to secure over seven hundred type-
written pages of memoranda recording incriminating conversa-
tions. It is to be noted that the officers did not trespass on the
suspects’ property in obtaining this information. The headquar-
ters wires were tapped in the basement of the office building in
which the organization was housed, and the connections with the
private ’phones of the gang leaders were made from the street.

Olmstead and his fellow malefactors were indicted on the evi-
dence secured through the wire-tapping and through subsequent
searches made under warrants. The evidence obtained under the
warrants, however, was suppressed on the ground that the war-
rants had not described with sufficient exactness the incriminat-
ing evidence which the police discovered. This left the state with
nothing but the evidence secured through “listening in” on the
telephone conversations.

The Olmstead attorneys then moved that this evidence be sup-
pressed on the ground that it had been obtained by “unreason-
able search.” The trial court, however, denied this petition, and
the Olmstead leaders were convicted. The case was, of course, ap-
pealed, and it finally came to the Supreme Court, where the sig-
nificant question to be answered was concerned with the legality
of this evidence.

Five of the justices agreed that its use was proper, four decided
against it. The conviction stood affirmed. It is of interest, never-
theless, to note that the majority of the justices, in passing favora-
bly on the question, did not so much as suggest that the police
had acted “reasonably”: they merely took the rather technical
position that “listening in” without trespass on the suspects’ prop-
erty was not a “search” within the meaning of the Constitution.
Some of the minority insisted that tapping wires and listening to
criminals’ or suspected criminals* private conversations is a viola-
tion of the law, is a search, and is — even under such circumstances
as obtained in the Olmstead case — ^unreasonable. Some of the jus-

446 John Barker Waite

tices believed that whether or not there was a technical search
in this case, the evidence should have been suppressed because
th police had acted illegally. But all, apparently, would have
agreed that, had the officers entered Olmstead’s house and in-
stalled a detectaphone, as Inspector Elk did in fighting the Fel-
lowship of the Frog, any incriminating evidence thus obtained
could not have been used against the defendants.

It might be a happy facilitation of the police task in repressing
crime if we could invest our real detectives with these privileges
which detectives in fiction enjoy. But desirable privilege and
power presuppose discretion, and real detectives are not endowed
with discretion by mere alteration of the law. Perhaps Hanaud
with his high ideals and delicacy of feeling could be entrusted
with power; perhaps Poirot, and Philo Vance, complacent and ir-
ritating though he is, have the tact and intelligence essential to
high privilege. But what of Sergeant Heath, of Gregson of Scot-
land Yard, and all the other dogged folk of detective fiction? What
of the average police officer in real life?

In any event, when one considers the inequality of facilities
between fiction and reality, it is not surprising that fiction is suc-
cessful where reality frequently fails.

The Crux of a Murder: Disposal of the Body
By F. Sherwood Taylor

oooooooo(rooooootfooooooooooo»o<roo6aoo

This pleasantly grim and realistic examination of a problem close
to the hearts of murderers appeared in the Spectator for April g,
^937* • • • Suggested exercise in practical criticism: let the reader
apply Mr. Taylofs method and logic to the problem in Lord
Dunsanfs much-acclaimed short story ^ "'The Two Bottles of
Relish/' beloved of anthologists.

jtsjiiULaiuuiiuuui^

When Dorian Gray murdered Basil Hallward, he knew at once
that the disposal of the corpse in the locked room was no task for
his exquisite fingers. Fortunately he knew a secret about the man
of science, Alan Campbell, which was so discreditable that the lat-
ter consented to destroy the corpse. Said he,

“Is there a fire in the room upstairs?*'

“Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos.”

“I shall have to go home and get some things from the labora-
tory.”

(Dorian Gray would have none of this and sent his valet.)

“After ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
entered carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a
long coil of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously
shaped iron clamps.”

After five hours of work Campbell completed his task.

“As soon as Campbell had left he went upstairs. There was a
horrible smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing which
had been sitting at the table was gone.”

Since the days when I believed The Picture of Dorian Gray to
be the high-water mark of English fiction, I have wondered how
Campbell did it. Nitric acid is an admirable agent: a mouse boiled

447

448 F. Sherwood Taylor

in it for a few minutes is converted into a transparent pale-yellow
solution. But how did Alan get enough nitric acid to boil Basil?
And what did he do with the coils and the curiously-shaped
clamps?

The problem of the murderer who has been imprudent enough
to find himself burdened with a corpse, whose existence is proof
of his crime, is one which has presented itself to many writers of
the detective-novels which enjoy such deserved popularity today.
It may be stated — ^a little crudely — thus. It is required to resolve
about 120 lbs. of protein, fat and bone into matter unrecognisable
as having formed part of a human body. There are, moreover, at
least three essential conditions. The operation is to be performed
single-handed, without attracting attention, and within a few
days.

It is doubtful whether the problem has ever been solved in
practice. Looked at as a chemical operation, it involves the con-
version of protein, fat and bone — calcium phosphate — into an un-
organised condition. It is best that the final product should be gas
or liquid, which will become utterly lost in the air or the sewer
respectively. The simplest means of destruction is fire, used with
some success by Landru; but, unless very powerful and large fires,
as of a steam-boiler, are available, it is very difficult to complete
the combustion, and the smell of burning is such as to lead to de-
tection. The four or five pounds of ash which are left contain far
more phosphates than that from any wood or coal; and, as Lan-
dru found, metal objects, dentures, &:c., may survive the fire. The
extraordinary criminal Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H. H.
Holmes, who equipped a “castle’* in Sixty-third and Wallace
Streets, Chicago, for the purpose of murder, had a private crema-
torium of a most efficient type. Such luxuries are not a fair solu-
tion of the murderer’s problem. Given a crematorium or heated
furnace-chamber, cremation followed by dissolving of the ashes
in hydrochloric acid and the flushing of the liquid down the
drains, would be admirable practice; always provided that frag-
ments of gold and porcelain from dentures were strained off and
later dropped into the sea from a Channel steamer.

Caustic alkalis and strong acids will do the work as well as
fiire, and without the tell-tale odour of burning. Strong acids are

The Crux of a Murder: Disposal of the Body 449

diifiicult to manipulate, because it is hard to obtain any vessel at
once proof against their corrosion, capable of being heated and
large enough to contain a body. The use of alkalis is simpler, and
in 1897 the Chicago sausage-maker Luetgert nearly solved the
problem. He bought 750 lbs. of caustic potash, much used for
making soft-soap — and imprudently enough caused an employee
to break it up. He put the potash and his murdered wife in a vat,
used for colouring sausages, and blew in steam from a boiler. The
strong solution of caustic potash dissolved the whole body, except
the bones, to a brown liquid. The bones he broke up and burned
in the steam-boiler’s furnace. But, like most murderers, he failed
in matters of detail. He did not conceal his unusual actions from
the night-watchman and did not empty the vat. In it were found
a few recognisable human bones and two tell-tale rings; the ashes
from the furnace also contained recognisable fragments of human
bone. In France an attempt was recently made to destroy a body
by immersion in sulphuric acid. It failed because the action of the
acid, if unheated, is slow and partial.

Having said so much, I cannot decline the inevitable challenge
to solve the problem myself for the benefit of future weavers of
the fiction of crime. Here, then, is my solution. If I ever decided
to take to murder, I would prefer to use my professional powers
of synthesising poisons which would baffle the very moderate re-
sources of the analyst, rather than to attempt the revolting butch-
er’s work of destroying a body. But if destruction there must be,
I ask for a reasonably small cadaver, and a house with a gas-copper,
and main drainage. I need a minimum of forty-eight hours undis-
turbed. I also suppose myself to have a complete indiflEerence to
corpses, acquired, let us say, by years in the post-mortem room.

As soon as I have committed the murder, I lay the corpse in
the bath. I at once drive in my own car to London or a neigh-
bouring town. I buy at an oil-and-colour merchants a 1 cwt. drum
of flake caustic soda. From my chemical retailers I buy a piece of
wire gauze, some rubber tubing, and four Winchester quarts of
nitric acid. The purchase excites no attention, as I am known as
a chemist. I also purchase a whetstone, a very large casserole and
some string. I ligature the limbs, each in two places, to prevent
effusion of much blood and, leaving the corpse in the bath with

450 P- Sherwood Taylor

cold water running, I sever the limbs between the ligatures, with
a sharp knife and a hacksaw. I eviscerate the trunk and cut it
into four pieces. I also split the skull. The blood is so diluted by
running water that no deposit is made. Meanwhile I have put
half the caustic soda in the copper and just covered it with water.
The heat of solution causes the liquid to boil. I light the gas
under the copper, and introduce the limbs one by one. As soon
as the flesh of each limb has dissolved, I remove the larger bones
with tongs, wash them and break them into fragments.

Meanwhile I have half filled the casserole with concentrated
nitric acid and heated it on a gas-ring set up in a fireplace. I add
the bone fragments one at a time to the hot nitric acid, where-
upon they rapidly dissolve, the fumes passing up the chimney
with the hot air. As each lot of acid becomes exhausted, I pour
it down the toilet, after diluting it in a slop-pail with 30 times
its bulk of water, so making it too dilute to attack the pipes. When
dissolving the jawbone I take care to collect the gold tooth-fillings
and put them in my waistcoat-pocket. Finally I dissolve my over-
all and the victim’s clothes in the hot caustic soda solution. The
liquid left in the copper I ladle down the drains, running the taps
all the while. Any residue of small bones, buttons, 8 cc., left in the
copper — the wire gauze has its uses here — is dissolved in the cas-
serole of nitric acid. The copper, sink, bath and casserole are care-
fully washed, and the rooms cleaned up. I now cook myself a
hearty meal in the kitchen and have a good hot bath, so account-
ing for the disturbed state of the rooms.

The empty drum of caustic soda, the acid bottles and the cas-
serole are taken in the car to my laboratory, where there are many
others of the same kind. Here I dissolve the gold tooth fillings in
aqua regia^ grind the porcelain false teeth in an iron mortar and
dissolve them in hydrofluoric acid in a leaden dish. The body is
now converted into liquid and gaseous matter and is wholly un-
recognisable. Quod erat faciendum.

But the process is not really to be recommended. Something
would go wrong somewhere, for a new chemical technique can
rarely be learned by less than two or three attempts. With the ex-
ception of the virtuosi, such as Landru and H. H. Holmes, few
of us commit enough murders to become adepts in the art of con-
cealing them* Perhaps it is just as well*

TsinnnnnroirT^nnnnnrsinnnnnr^

PUTTING CRIME ON
THE SHELF

' ff 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 QJ) 0 OOOQO<i^OOO<lOOQQOj}OOQOOQOOOOOOOt

For bibliophiles, bibliographers, and — readers.

Collecting Detective Fiction
By John Carter

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo((oooooo'oooooooooo(ro 2 ^odo(r

John Carter is best known to the transatlantic reading public as
the distinguished co-author, with Graham Pollard, of An Enquiry
Into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, an
innocently titled volume which, nevertheless, exploded in 19J4
one of the most devastating literary bombshells of all time — the
exposure of the Thomas /. Wise forgeries, Vincent Starrett has
called the book ''one of the great detective stories of the world/'
Manifestly, Mr, Carter was qualified by experience and inclina-
tion to become the first important bibliographer of the detective
story itself. The present selection was first published as a chapter
in New Paths in Book-Collecting, edited by Mr, Carter {London:
Constable, 1934) and was subsequently reissued in its own right as
Collecting Detective Fiction (London: Constable; New York:
Scribner's, 1938), Despite the passage of years, this pioneer work
has yet to be superseded as a whole, though later and specialized
information has modified some of its findings: it is still the "bible"
of the collector of detective fiction, , , , During World War II,
Mr, Carter directed the general division of the British Informa-
tion Services in New York; he has now returned to England as
director of the London branch of the American publishing house
of Scribner. An Englishman, he should not be confused with the
American journalist and detective story writer John Carter, who
writes variously as ^'Jay Franklin" and "Diplomat."

j?qqoqoqqooooqooooqooo_qoj?^o o_oj> 0

INTRODUCTION

The detective story shows every sign of having come to stay. As
a literary form it is not yet 100 years old, and there have not been

453

454 John Carter

wanting during its most recent heyday (which is still going on)
certain crabbed persons to prophesy that such a boom must end
in a slump, with the implied, or sometimes explicit, rider that the
sooner this happens the better for the republic of letters. But
even if the output of detective stories stopped to-morrow, the
vogue has been long enough and prolific enough for the produc-
tion of a body of literature which the Taines and Saintsburys of
the future will not be able to ignore, even should they wish. In
point of fact, there is no reason why they should wish. For quite
apart from the distinguished authors scattered up and down its
history, it is notorious that the detective story is the favourite
reading of statesmen, of dons in our older universities, and in fact
of all that is most intellectual in the reading public. The late
Lord Rosebery possessed a first edition of The Memoirs of Sher-
lock HolmeSy and Mr. Philip Guedalla has been credited with the
observation that *‘the detective story is the normal recreation of
noble minds.” The Provost of Eton is an acknowledged authority
on this, as on so many other subjects; Mr. Desmond MacCarthy
is a prominent Holmesian scholar; and the Secretary to the Syn-
dics of the Cambridge University Press is responsible for the
standard life of Doctor Watson.

If we err, therefore, in our liking for detective stories, we err
with Plato.

But if we are pleased to take them reasonably seriously, our
first consideration must be to distinguish the detective story
proper from the various types of literature which are its first cou-
sins on one side or the other. This may not be essential to the
reader, but the collector, even one with ample shelf room, will
probably find himself, amongst such a wealth of kindred mate-
rial compelled to reserve his energies and space for the genuine
article only. On the one hand, then, he will avoid criminology;
any records of actual facts. This principle need not, of course,

Note . — ^Tlie binding of all books referred to must be understood to be cloth, unless
otherwise stated. Where particulars are given of any book which I have not
examined personally I have indicated the fact (after the manner of the illustrious
Hain) by attaching a double asterisk. Dates, etc., in such cases must therefore be under-
stood to derive from the standard reference books or other authorities.

• S. C. Roberts, Doctor Watson (Faber, i§3i)» The first part of this had previously
appeared in Life md Letters,

Collecting Detective Fiction 455

exclude fiction based on fact, like Poe’s '‘The Mystery of Marie
Roget” or Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone* * * § The former, as is well
known, was constructed from the newspaper accounts of an inves-
tigation then actually proceeding in New York, and the paper
which published Poe’s story did not dare, for very good reason,
to take it as far as his conclusion. It is said * that, years later, the
confession of the persons he indicated confirmed the accuracy of
his solution. As for The Moonstone^ several incidents and the
detective himself — the immortal Sergeant Cuff — ^were lifted from
the sensational Constance Kent case, which had taken place a
few years earlier.f Nor need fiction masquerading as fact be
barred. Some of the many volumes which appeared in London
from the ’fifties onwards, purporting to be reminiscences, may
actually have been genuine; but the authors of most of them were
literary hacks, and it is probably safe to label the whole class of
"Revelations” and "Experiences” and "Diaries” of "Real Detec-
tives” and "Ex-detectives” as fiction, at any rate as far down as
1890.

At the other end of the scale the line is often much more diffi-
cult to draw. Many uncritical people, if suddenly asked to name
a modern writer of detective stories, would offer Edgar Wallace;
but actually Wallace wrote very few detective stories proper.^ If
we decide, as surely we must, that a detective story within the
meaning of the act must be mainly occupied with detection and
must contain a proper detective (whether amateur or profes-
sional), it is clear that mystery stories, crime stories, spy stories,
shockers, even Secret Service stories, will have to be excluded un-
less any particular example can show some authentic detective
strain. We may choose to admit to our collection The Four Just
Men § or Raffles \\ or The Thirty Nine Steps^^ but it must be
realised (unless we are prepared for their logical results — to the

* Sayers, Detection^ Mystery md Horror (Gollancz, 1928) p. 18.

f Famous Trials Series. The Trial of Constance Kent (Hodge, 1931).

{Exceptions are Room 13 0 ohn Long, 1924) and The Clue of the Silver Key
(Hodder Sc Stoughton, 1930).

§ By Edgar Wallace (The Tallis Press, 1905). The book was published without
the concluding chapter and a prize of £500 was offered for the correct solution. The
competition slip comes at the end of the book.

II E. W. Homung, The Amateur Cracksman (Methuen, 1898).

f By John Buchan (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1915).

456 John Carter

tune of several thousand volumes) that they are there as a matter
of grace and not of right.

Considering that all the historical and literary criticism of the
detective story is the product of so short a period, the subject
is singularly fortunate in the commentators it has attracted. The
specialists ^ in the exegesis and chronology of the Sherlock
Holmes cycle are perhaps rather advanced for the layman, who
often finds the higher criticism wearisome, to whatever it is ap-
plied; but if Mr. H. W. Bell's thoroughness f is terrifying, others
besides Conan Doyle enthusiasts enjoy Father Ronald Knox’s
erudite virtuosity. J

Of workers in the field as a whole four names stand out. The
late E. M. Wrong, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a
distinguished historian, introduced his selection of Crime and
Detection in the World's Classics series § with an essay, analytical,
philosophical and historical, which remains the best thing yet
written on the subject. Willard Huntington Wright, who is prob-
ably better known by his pen name of S. S. Van Dine, introduced
a bulkier anthology || in the following year with an excellently
balanced survey, which has for our present purpose this advantage
over Wrong’s that it is packed with detail. In 1928 Miss Dorothy
Sayers,^ in a similar r 61 e, proved herself as distinguished a critic
and historian as she is a creative artist. And in 1931 Mr. H, Doug-
las Thomson produced, in a work whose title ff belies its merits,
the first full-length study of the detective story.

Although there have been other, mostly critical, contributions

* E,g., T, S. Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes, Fact or Fiction? (Murray, 1932); Vincent
Starrett, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (New York: Macmillan, 1933); Baker
Street Studies, edited by H. W. Bell (Constable, 1934). Cf. also Roberts' book.

f Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Constable, 1932).

‘ i '"Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes'* in Essays in Satire (Sheed S:
Ward, 1928)* This had previously appeared in The Blue Book and in Blackfriars,
§ No, 301 (Oxford University Press, 1926). As with all volumes in this series, late
issues are usually betrayed by the inserted advertisements listing subsequently
published titles.

[| The Great Detective Stories (New York: Scribner's, 1927).
f Great Short Stories of Mystery, Detection and Horror (Gollancz, 1928)- In her
introduction to the Second Series (1931) Miss Sayers discusses the present and future,
rather than the past.

•ff Markers of Mystery (Collins, 1931).

Collecting Detective Fiction 457

from such writers as G. K. Chesterton,* Father Knox,f and Ver-
non Rendall,J those four authors are our main authorities § for
the general history and development of the detective story.

THE MAIN OUTLINE

1. THE POE-WILKIE COLLINS-GABORIAU PERIOD

The main outline is familiar enough. There have been at-
tempts, it is true, to establish Herodotus, Sophocles and the au-
thors of certain books of the Apocrypha as early exponents of the
detective story; but these are hardly justified; and though we to-
day may account it strange that there were no true examples of
the form before 1 840, it is usually and rightly held that it origi-
nated with Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's three great stories 1 | touched
a level of excellence very remarkable in view of their incunabular
position and one to which no other writer attained for twenty-
five years, even if (as some doubt) they have ever been equalled.^
Poe may have tired of his brilliant creation, or (and the lack of
immediate successors in his own country makes this more likely)
perhaps public response was lukewarm. At any rate it was not
until Charles Dickens’ interest in the recently created police de-
tective force in London ff had been communicated by him to

• See The Defendant (Brimley Johnson, 1901); also his Preface to W. S, Master-
man’s The Wrong Letter (Methuen, 1926).

fE-g. his introduction to The Best Detective Stories of 1928 (Faber, 1929).

X London Nights df Belsize (Lane, 1917).

§ None of them are pedantically concerned with the dates of the original editions,
as the collector must naturally be, and he will do well to check all dates given
The first attack on the subject from a bibliographical and collecting angle with
which I am familiar is an article by Mr. E. A. Osborn in The Bookman of February,
1932, and to that pioneer effort I take this opportunity of making a bow.

11 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The
Purloined Letter.” “Thou Art the Man,” although an inferior example, should not
be ignored (as it usually is), but “The Gold Bug” is not a true detective story at all.

^They are analysed in full by Thomson (op. df., pp. 75-S5), following Sayers
{op. dt, pp. 17-18),

ft Sir Robert Peel’s creation of the police force dates from 1828, but it was only in
1845 that the germ of the Criminal Investigation Department (1876) was born. In
that year Sir James Graham detailed twelve police officers for exclusive plain clothes
detective woidc. Dickens was the first writer to recognise their importance, and he
devoted four articles in Household Words (July — September, 1850) to a description
of their work. “It is significant,” writes Mr. Osborn, “that it is after that period
that the spate of detective reminiscences and pseudo-reminiscences appears,” and
to these we shall return later.

458 John Carter

Wilkie Collins, that we come to the next landmark. In 1868, how-
ever, appeared The Moonstone/^ which Mr. T. S. Eliot f has
called “the first, the longest and the best of modern detective
stories.” Mr. Eliot is inaccurate in his first adjective, a little rash
perhaps in his second, J but unlikely to meet with much disagree-
ment over his third. If Poe created the short detective story, Wil-
kie Collins is the undisputed father of the full-length variety, and
it remained in the ascendant for higher class work until the ar-
rival of Sherlock Holmes.

Meanwhile a star had arisen across the English Channel, and
the novels of Emile Gaboriau § took France by storm. U Affaire
Lerouge ** was published in Le Pays in 1866 and Gaboriau pro-
duced a number of equally famous successors \\ to it before his
death in 1873. He was followed by Fortune du Boisgobey, whose
novels, always full of dramatic incident, sometimes degenerate
into mere sensational police stories; but at his infrequent best
he was not unworthy of his acknowledged master, f The influence
of these two was more productive abroad than at home. There
are few f f French detective stories of any note between Boisgobey’s
death in 1891 and the appearance of another pair of contempora-
neous masters, MM. Leroux and Leblanc, about fifteen years

* Three vols., Tinsley, 1868. (See Sadleir, Excursions in Victorian Bibliography, p.

f Introduction to the World*s Classics edition, first issued in 1928 (No. 316). Mr.
Eliot emphasises Dickens* influences on Wilkie Collins at this time, and there is
little doubt that in the unfinished Edwin Drood, 1870, we have lost what might well
have been a masterpiece of full length detection.

i Several other three-deckers must run it pretty close; such as Is He the Man?, by
W. Clark Russell (Tinsley, 1876), or The Wrong Road, by Major Arthur Griffiths
(Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1888); while Le Crime de VOpira ** by Fortune du
Boisgobey (Paris, 1880), runs to **over four hundred pages of microscopic type**
(Thomson, op, ciL, p. 111).

§ It is not impossible that Gaboriau was familiar with Baudelaire*s translation of
Poe*s Tales, which had appeared in Paris in 1856 and 1857. suitable

that America should reciprocate so much more promptly than England with transla-
tions of Gaboriau.

II jLe Dossier ns,** 1867; Le Crime d'Orcival,** 1868; Monsieur Lecoq,** 1869, etc.

f His best known works are UHomme sans Horn,** 1872; Le Eorgat Colonel,**
1872; Le Crime de Wpira,** 1880; and Le Crime de rOmnibus (Paris: Dentu, 1881).
In one story, The Old Age of Lecoq,** he does honour to his master, Gaboriau, by
borrowing his detective.

ff Mention may be made, however, of Three Exploits of M. Parent, from the
French of Jules Lermina (Osgood, Mdlvaine, 1894), and The Meudon Mystery, by
Jules Mary Vizetelly, 1888).

Collecting Detective Fiction 459

later. Translations of Gaboriau and Boisgobey did not appear in
London until the i88o*s, but once launched in Vizetelly’s cheap
red-wrappered editions they sold in very large numbers, and their
illustration of French police methods has had considerable influ-
ence in the development of what we regard to-day as the Crofts
school of writers.* But, as one finds, unexpectedly, in the case of
other of Vizetelly’s continental importations, England waited on
the United States; translations of Gaboriau had appeared in Bos-
ton and New York years before his fellow countryman introduced
them to London.f They stimulated a public interest which rap-
idly evoked response in the form of native products, and though
their influence on the celebrated Pinkerton series J was probably
no greater than that exerted by the numerous volumes of fictional
memoirs which had pervaded the English bookstalls since 1855,
it is plainly apparent in the work of Anna Katharine Green,
whose vogue, beginning in earnest with The Leavenworth Case §
in i8y 8, remained the dominant feature of the American scene
for several decades. 1| Lawrence L. Lynch (Mrs. Murdoch van

* Of Lecoq, Thomson says (op, dt., p. 98): '‘Here is Inspector French’s prototype.”
f Startlingly prompt was T/ie Steel Safe, or The Stains and Splendours of New
York Life (Adapted from E, Gaboriau*s Le Dossier No. 113), by H. L. Jr. (New York:
De Witt, i868 *•). After this came others: File 113,** from Estes and Lauriat, of
Boston, in 1875 (liondon: Vizetelly, 1883 **); The Mystery of Ordval,** ditto, 1871
(London: Vizetelly, 1885); The Widow Lerouge,** from Osgood, of Boston, 1873
(London: Vizetelly, 1885 ♦*); and Boisgobey’s The Golden Tress,** Claxton,
Remington and Haffelfinger, Philadelphia, 1875 (London: Vizetelly, 1887 *♦).

J The first of these, as far as I can find, was The Expressman and the Detective,
by Allan Pinkerton (Chicago: W. B. Keen, Cooke & Co., 1874), and by 1883
tha n a dozen soi-disants selections from the case book of the famous agency had
appeared. Between 1875 (The Detective and the Somnambulist) and 1876 (The
Model Town and the Detectives) publication seems to have been taken over by
G. W. Carleton 8c Co., of New York, but all the volumes are illustrated with engrav-
ings and embellished as to their covers with a vignette in gilt of a fierce and rather
oriental looking eye, accompanied by the firm’s slogan, “We Never Sleep.”

There was also a later series, issued monthly from March, 1887, onwards, by
Laird & Lee, of Chicago. This was called The Frank Pinkerton Detective Series, and
Included such tite as Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective,** %ooo Reward,** and
Jim Cummings or the Great Adams Express Robbery. The bindings of these are
more elaborate, but omit the firm’s trade mark.

§New York, Putnam. Three editions were published in London in 1884, of which
fitrahan’s is probably the earliest, the British Museum copy having been received
on May and. The reception date of the Ward, Lock edition is August 8th, of the
Routledge edition October 13th (both pictorial wrappers).

II W. H- Wright (op. dt., p. 15) selects for mention from her long list Hand and
Ring, (New York; Putnam, 1883), Behind Closed Doors (ditto, i888, cloth or
wrappers); The Filigree Ball (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1905); The House of the

460 John Carter

Deventer) was a fairly prolific runner-up,’^ but although subse-
quent American writers were by no means idle, they contributed f
little of importance to the development of the genre until com-
paratively recent years.

11. THE SHERLOCK HOLMES PERIOD

In 1887 two remarkable events occurred, which make this year
perhaps the most memorable in the whole history of detective fic-
tion. The first was the sensational success of The Mystery of a
Hansom Cab, by Fergus W. Hume. Published in Melbourne,
Australia, the first edition of 5.000 copies was sold out in a week
and others followed in quick succession; the publisher, Frederick
Trischler, migrated with the book to London; the first London
edition | of 25,000 copies, issued over the imprint of the Hansom
Cab Publishing Company, was exhausted in three days; and when
the author died,§ in 1932, over half a million copies in all had
been sold. No other detective story before or since can have
touched such sale records, H and it is not surprising that by the
historians as well as by the public Hume is to-day regarded as a
one-book man. In fact, he wrote over a hundred other books, of
which about half were detective stories,^ and if he is now not

Whispering Pines** (New York: Putnam, 1910); and The Step on the Stair**
(New York: Dodd, 1923).

* Shadowed by Three** (Chicago: Donnelley, Cassette & Loyd, 1879); Madeline
Payne ** (Chicago: A. T. Loyd & Co., 1884); The Diamond Coterie ** and Danger-
ous Ground (ditto, both 1885), etc., etc Ward, Lock Sc Routledge were busy with
sixpenny editions in London from 1884 onwards, and the former became her au-
thorised publishers in the ’nineties, re-issuing the early titles and publishing new
ones in superbly pictorial cloth at half-a-crown each.

f Mention should perhaps be made of Julian Hawthorne’s books, e.g.. Section 558
(New York: Cassell, 1888); Another's Crime (ditto, 1888).

{These details are drawn from a sixteen-page pamphlet advertising the book
which Trischler issued shortly after it had appeared in London. No copy of the first
London edition has so far been discovered: that in the British Museum is of the
250th thousand; and the earliest I have examined is a copy of the 100th thousand,
the cover of which was reproduced in Mr. Osborn’s Bookman article. All these early
editions are in black and white pictorial wrappers,

§ It was stated at this time that Hume had originally sold the MS. outright for

|j In 1888 the book achieved the distinction of a full length parody — The Mystery
of a Wheel-Barrow or Gaboriau Gaborooed, by W. Humer Ferguson (Walter Scott,
1SS8, pictorial wrappers).

f The most important to the collector are The Piccadilly Puzzle (F. V. White,
1S89, cloth or wrappers); The Gentleman Who Vanished (F. V. White, 1890, pictorial

Collecting Detective Fiction 461

much read, his position in any historical survey is a significant
one.

The other event of the year is unquestionably the more im-
portant. *‘In 1887/' writes Miss Sayers (op. cit., p. 28), ''A Study
in Scarlet was flung like a bombshell into the field of detective
fiction, to be followed within a few short and brilliant years by
the marvellous series of Sherlock Holmes short stories. The effect
was electric. Conan Doyle took up the Poe formula and galvanised
it into life and popularity.” Sherlock Holmes quickly reached, and
has never lost, a position in the detective world which no other
and abler practitioners have ever approached. It may be that we
read these stories now less for their purely detective interest (al-
ways considerable) than for their masterly character drawing; it is
true that the more fanatical tend to regard Watson as almost
more important than Holmes, just as there are always some who
attribute Socrates* quality to Plato or Johnson’s to Boswell; * but
it is as impossible to exaggerate Holmes* pre-eminent influence
over the next generation of detectives as it is to recreate that
golden age when the public stood in queues at the bookstall for
the new issue of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle has been a
favourite with collectors for some years now, and as he has his
own bibliographer f the details of his books need not detain us.
The resounding success of Holmes was the signal for a great in-
crease in activity among detective story writers, and the last dec-
ade of the nineteenth century was favoured with a good deal of
excellent work. The Wrong Box, by R, L. Stevenson and Lloyd
Osbourne J and The Black Box Murder** by [Maarten Maar-
tens],§ both published in 1889, showed serious authors tackling
the medium, and in 1894 Arthur Morrison introduced in Martin

wrappers); The Black Carnation (Gale fc Polden [1892], pictorial wrappers); The
Chinese Jar (Sampsoii Low, 1893, pictorial boards); A Midnight Mystery (Gale &
Polden [1894], pictorial wrappers); The Lone Inn (Jarxold, 1894); The Lady from
Nowhere (Chatto k Windus, 1900).

♦ Holmes himself said “I am lost without my Boswell.**

f The late Captain Harold Locke's Bibliography was published in 1928 (Tun-
bridge Wells: B. Webster).

J Longmans, Green. The first issue has the headings of the Contents page and
the first page of text in the same type (Prideaux, 1918, p. 71).

§ Remington published this, aca>rding to The English Catalogue. There is no
copy in the British Museum and I have failed to discover one in several years* search.

462 John Carter

Hewitt * * * § the most considerable of Holmes’ immediate successors.
The work of L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax proved that the
combination of a novelist and a doctor could be a fruitful one,
and the two series of Stories from the Diary of a Doctor f marked
the advance of scientific detection towards its most famous ex-
ponent, Doctor Thorndyke. M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski J has
many of the immortal Dupin’s characteristics, and his talents are
not unworthy of his prototype; but Mr. ShieFs books in collabora-
tion with Louis Tracy § are not up to the standards of either
author working alone. Tracy has a number of good books to his
credit,ll but his principal detective, Furneaux, was eclipsed by the
rising stars of the new century.

In 1904, Arnold Bennett showed, in The Grand Babylon Ho-
tely^ that he could write an adventure-detective story as well as
anybody; but he wrote no more. In 1907, however, Dr. R. Austin
Freeman published through the obscure firm of Collingwood a
book which marks a new level in scientific detection. The Red
Thumb Markff introduced Doctor Thorndyke, whom Wrong
considered “the greatest detective now in business,” and it was
only the first of a long series. John Thorndyke* s Cases (Chatto Sc
Windus, 1909) followed, and in The Singing Bone (Hodder Sc
Stoughton, 1912) Dr. Freeman achieved one of his greatest tri-

* Martin Hewitt, Investigator (Ward, Lock & Bowden, Ltd., 1894: the cloth blue,
red or green); Chronicles of Martin Hewitt (ditto, 1895); The Adventures of Martin
Hewitt (Ward Lock & Co., Ltd., 1896). The Dorrington Deed Box (ditto, 1897)
records the exploits of the detective who gives his name to the title.

f Newnes, 1894; and Bliss, Sands & Foster, 1896.

jjohn Lane, 1895, No. VII. of the Keynote Series. The bright purple doth is
almbst always faded.

§ These appeared over the pen name of "‘Gordon Holmes.” The ArncUffe Puzzle
(Werner Laurie, 1906); A Mysterious Disappearance (New York: A. Wessels Com-
pany, 1906); The Late Tenant (Cassell, 1907); By Force of Circumstances, which
probably appeared in U.S.A. prior to the issue of the English edition (Mills & Boon,
March loth, 1910). Mr. John Gawsworth, in Ten Contemporaries (1931), pp, 194-5,
states that Mr. Shiel repudiates any connection with the first two titles: in this case,
Tracy must presumably have been using the alias alone before the collaboration
began.

II The Strange Disappearance of Lady Delia (Pearson, 1901); The Silent Home
(Eveleigh Nash, 1911); The Case of Mortimer Fenley (Cassell, 1915).

f Chatto & Windus, 1904.

ff- This was issued simultaneously in doth and in wrappers, in each case black and
ornamented with a red thumb print. Both forms are very scarce indeed.

Collecting Detective Fiction 4®3

umphs with a series of stories in which the reader is first shown
the crime being committed and afterwards accompanies Thorn-
dyke in his solution. To waive the advantages of suspense and sur-
prise is a severe test for any detective author, but in the event
these are among Freeman’s best stories.'*'

Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner (Greening, 1908)
is an early and persuasive example of the intuitive school of de-
tectives, which has become better known through the work of
G. K. Chesterton’s Roman Catholic Priest, Father Brown; f and,
more lately, by H. C. Bailey’s series of books describing the ex-
ploits of Reginald Fortune, J whose conversational powers prevent
some people from estimating his talent as dispassionately as they
otherwise might. Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados,§ being blind,
is to some extent inevitably intuitive, but his methods in general
are as ruthlessly logical as the purist could wish.

With A. E. W. Mason’s Hanaud in 1910 we return to a really
great policeman, after a period in which the amateur or the pri-
vate agent had been practically in possession of the field. At the
Villa Rose |j was followed by The House of the Arrow and The
Prisoner in the Opal^^ but their author has other fish to fry and
we have not had as many of Hanaud’s cases as could be wished.

In 1913 what may be called the Sherlock Holmes period comes
to an end; and it ends with a book which can hold its own with

* Other early and scarce titles are The Mystery of $1 New Inn (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1912); A Silent Witness (ditto, 1914); The Eye of Osiris (ditto, 1911: first
in brown cloth with Egyptian style decoration and lettering, later issue in plain
brown); The Great Portrait Mystery (ditto, 1918). Most of the later Thomdyke
books are, naturally, easier to come but the first editions are not always easy to
distinguish, owing to Messrs. Hodder & Stoughton’s exasperating antipathy to dating
their publications.

fThe Innocence of Father Brown (Cassell, 1911); The Wisdom (ditto, 1914), etc.
Mr. Chesterton later devoted his attention to the illustrations, for Mr. Hilaire Belloc,
of a special kind of burlesque detective story which, being sui generis^ is appropri-
ately known as the Chester-Belloc.

t Call Mr, Fortune (Methuen, 1920); Mr, Fortune's Practice {ditto, 1925); Mr. For^
tune's Trials (ditto, 1926), etc. »

%Max Carrados (Methuen, 1914); The Eyes of Max Carrados (Grant Richards,
1925); Max Carrados Mysteries (Hodder Sc Stoughton, 1927).

II Hodder & Stoughton, 1910. The dist binding is light blue doth; later issues
of the book were put out in buff, and also in maroon with vertical buff stripes, with
the edges cut down. ^

I Hodder Sc Stoughton (1924) and ditto (1929) respectively.

464 John Carter

any detective story ever written — ^E. C. Bentley's T rent's Last Case
(Nelson, 1913). Trent’s few other cases, published later, were per-
haps disappointing, but his last is sufficient for his immortality.

in. THE MODERNS IN ENGLAND

The European War put an effective stop to the production of
detective fiction, but its revival was signalised in 1920 by the ap-
pearance of The Cask,* by Freeman Wills Crofts; a book not only
of very remarkable quality but one which has profoundly influ-
enced the modern detective story as a whole. Mr. Crofts combined
the elaboration of Gaboriau with an integrity of method which set
an altogether new standard for the many police detectives who
have followed Inspector French. The amount of patient work
French gets through is often too much for the reader who wants
entertainment rather than intellectual exercise, but it gives an
effect of realism which is an indispensable quality; and in practice
his scrupulous care for details, especially of time, produces re-
markable results, so that one critic has observed that any character
in a Crofts novel who has an absolutely impregnable alibi be-
comes ipso facto an object of immediate suspicion to the reader.
The Cask did not reach a second edition until 1921, and the first,
a small one, is extremely scarce. The Ponson Case, which seems
to be even scarcer, appeared in 1921, and The Fit Prop Syndicate
in the following year; and although French was then joined by
a number of distinguished rivals, he has continued to add work-
manlike cases to his record.

The years from 1920 onwards introduce one by one names
which are now household words in detective fiction. Nineteen-
twenty, Agatha Christie {The Mysterious Affair at Styles, New York,
Lane **); 1921, Eden Phillpotts {The Grey Room, New York, Mac-
millan) f ; 1922, A. A. Milne {The Red House Mystery, Methuen);

♦ This and all Mr. Crofts' subsequent books down to 1933 were published by
Collins. The collector should be on his guard against occasional secondary bindings
of light blue cloth lettered in black, instead of the dark blue lettered in red which
seems to have been standard from The Pit Prop Syndicate, 1922 down to Inspector
French md the Starvel Tragedy, 1927. The cloth of the first two books, mentioned
above, is red.

f Mr, Phillpotts has also written under the pen name of ''Harrington Hext" —
e.g.. The Thing at Their Heels (Thornton Butterworth, 1923), and it should be

Collecting Detective Fiction 465

1923, Dorothy Sayers (Whose Bodyf, New York, Boni & Liveright)
and G. D. H. Cole {The Brooklyn Murders^, Collins); 1924, Philip
MacDonald (The Raspj Collins) and Lynn Brock {The Deductions
of Colonel Gore, Collins); 1925, Anthony Berkeley {The Layton
Court Mystery, Jenkins: published anonymously), Ronald Knox
{The Viaduct Murder, Methuen); 1926, Henry Wade {The Ver^
diet of You All, Constable); and so on, down to the present day.
The later books by these authors are too well known to need list-
ing here; and as for others, the output of more recent years has
been so enormous, the general level of quality is so high, and the
very various enthusiasms of the cognoscenti are so intemperate,
that a selection would be as rash as it would be impractical.

IV. FRANCE AND AMERICA SINCE 1895

Of detective writers outside England since the Holmesian ren-
aissance, there are two Frenchmen * who must be considered —
Leblanc and Leroux; and something will be said about them in
the final section of this essay. There are also a large number of
Americans. It is true that for a time America tended to lag be-
hind England in the achievements and originality of method of
her fictional detectives — what a poor figure Arthur Reeve's Craig
Kennedy cuts, for instance, beside Doctor Thorndyke; but there
have been plenty of good stories written by such authors as Mel-
ville Davisson Post, Mary Roberts Rinehart, John T. McIntyre
and Isabel Ostrander (alias Robert Orr Chipperfield), and it is
unfortunate that it is impossible to provide adequate bibliographi-
cal details here. But the difficulty of getting the books from across
the Atlantic has been an insuperable obstruction, and the collector
will have to wait for a prophet from their own country, or do his
investigating for himself. Mr. W, H. Wright treats them, as is fit-
ting, more fully than our other authorities, and his information
provides an excellent groundwork.

As for the moderns: Hammett, Van Dine, Ellery Queen, Frances

noted that other detective stories of his were first published in U.S.A. — e.g,. The Red
Redmaynes (New York: Macmillan, 192a). The collector is referred to the BibH-
ogruphy by Percival Hinton, published in 1951 (Birmingham: Greville Worthington),
♦ No attempt will be made here to deal with the Germans and other Continental
writers. For a brief survey the reader is referred to W. H. Wright {op. cit., pp. 29-32).

466 John Carter

Noyes Hart and the rest; their names and works are as familiar
as those of their English colleagues and it is equally unnecessary
to insult the enthusiast by recapitulation.

SOME LESS KNOWN NAMES

The foregoing brief summary of the history of the detective
story covers no ground unfamiliar to even the casual student of
the subject, and it now remains to fill in a few of the gaps which
the authorities have left unbridged. The literary critic and the
historian rightly jump from one peak to another when they are
describing their explorations to readers largely ignorant of the
ground. But the collector is not only as much interested in the
out-of-the-way books of all periods as in the familiar titles; he is
also particularly curious about the early specimens of an after-
wards popular and well-known literary form. There may be fifty
detective stories published this year better than the best published
in, say, i860, but the interest of the latter lies, and very properly,
in the fact that it represents a period in the history of the type
about which the average collector is unlikely to know anything
at all. *'Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona/' says Wrong, *‘but we
have forgotten them, and tend to think of the pre-Holmes detec-
tives as of the pre-Shakespearian drama; to call them precursors
only/' This is true enough; and there are plenty of unregarded
post-Holmes detectives, too, to attract the curious eye of the col-
lector.

It was remarked above that police detection in England fol-
lowed, at some distance, the disestablishment of the Bow Street
Runners; * and although fictional reminiscences of the latter force
are very rare,f and not for our purpose very important, the large
output of similar productions by, or purporting to be by, de-
tectives and ex-detectives was a notable feature of those *‘dark

♦ Griffiths {Mysterits of Police and Crime, 1898, Vol. 1, p. 129) says that **the old
Bow Stiwt Runner cidier retired hrom business or set up what we should now call
private enquiry offices/*

f One example will suffice; Richmond, or Scenes in the Life of a Bow Street
Officer, Orawn up from his Private Memoranda (Colburn, 3 vols., 1827, boards).
The book was apparently no great success, for the original sheets were furnished
with caned titles in 1845 by A. K. Newman and re-issued in maroon zebra-striped
doth.

Collecting Detective Fiction 467

ages/’ the 1850’s and i86o’s. These collections mostly appeared in
the form of “yellow backs” and they continued to find a public
right down to the end of the century, but their complete omission
from the history books is amply accounted for by their extraor-
dinary rarity to-day — due mainly, of course, to this perishable and
ephemeral format. Nevertheless, to skip gaily from Poe to The
Moonstone is to ignore a large school of writers, whose influence
and early date promote them to a position of importance usually,
it is true, disproportionate to the actual quality of their work.

The most prolific author of this school was William Russell,
who wrote under the name of “Waters.” His best work was con-
tained in the two series of Recollections of a Detective Police
Officer (J. & C. Brown, 1856, and W. Kent, 1859), and the general
character of the style is typified by the caption to the elegant
frontispiece of the first volume * — “The game is up, my good Mr.
Gates, I arrest you for felony” — ^and by the quotation from Den-
man on the title page. This reads: “Police or Peace Officers are
the lifeguards of the sleeping realm, without whom chambers
would not be safe, nor the strong law of more potency than a bul-
rush.” This book is also a good example of the bibliographical
puzzles presented by the whole class, and indeed by yellow-backs
in general. In the first issue, the title page is dated, the preface
runs on to p. vii, and p. [viii] carries the Contents; for the second,
signature [A] was reprinted, there is no date on the title, the
preface is compressed to end on p. vi, p. [vii] taking the Contents
and p. [viii] being blank; the title of the third issue is identical
with that of the second, but by printing the frontispiece on a sepa-
rate single leaf instead of on [A]2 and removing the Contents to
the verso of the title, signature [A] is now reduced to two leaves
only. All three issues appeared in yellow picture boards at the
price of eighteen pence.

The same author’s Experiences of a French Detective Officer
“adapted from the MSS. of Theodore Duhamel” (Clarke [1861],
Parlour Library, No. 234, pictorial boards or cloth) contains an

*A German translation of this volume appeared in 1857— Ermnerwngen eines
CriminaUFolhisten von Waters (Leipzig: Koliman, printed wrappers); and a French
translation by Victor Perceval — Mimoires d*un Polkeman (Paris: Degorge-Cadot
[1868?], printed wrappers) — ^which does not give Waters’ name anywhere. Both these
trandations appeared in series of a similar iLaracter to the yellow back original.

468 John Carter

Introduction explaining '‘The Difference between English and
French Detectives,” which indeed a perusal of the text shows to
have been badly needed; and among his other books are Experi-
ences of a Real Detective by Inspector F. (Ward & Lock, 1862,
Shilling Volume Library, printed wrappers); The Autobiography
of An English Detective (two volumes, Maxwell, 1863, maroon
cloth); Undiscovered Crimes (Ward & Lock, 1862, decorated wrap-
pers); Mrs. Waldegrave's Will and other Tales (Ward, Lock &
Tyler, Parlour Library Sixpenny Series, No. 14, pictorial wrappers
[? 1870]); A Skeleton in Every House (Clarke [i860] Parlour Li-
brary, No. 222, pictorial boards or cloth). The tradition of Waters,
Charles Martel,* Andrew Forrester, Jr.f and others of similar type J
was carried on by a host of later writers, few of whom stand out
with any considerable run of titles. An exception is James Mc-
Govan, who produced a series of five extremely popular collections
during the ’seventies and ’eighties.§ William Henderson, also a
Scotsman, prefaced a similar volume in 1889 || with a statement that
"most of the so-called 'Experiences of Detective Officers’ have had
no foundation in fact,” Inspector Moser,^ in Stories from Scotland
Yard (Routledge, 1890) also insists that his tales "are all founded
upon actual facts,” and this tendency seems to have increased dur-
ing the ’nineties.

* The Detective's Note Book (Ward & Lock, i860); The Diary of an Ex-Detective
(ditto, i860). The real name of the author, or “editor/' was Thomas Delf.

■f Revelations of a Private Detective (Ward & Lock, 1863); Secret Service or Recol-
lections of a City Detective (ditto, 1864); The Female Detective (ditto, 1864).

J Examples are The Experiences of a Barrister (J. & C. Brown, 1856); Curiosities
of Crime in Edinburgh, by James McLevy (Edinburgh: Nimmo, 1861); The Irish
Police Officer, by Robert Curtis (WTard & Lock, 1861); Tom Fox or the Revelations of
a Detective (Vickers, i860); The Autobiography of a French Detective from 1828-
1858, by M. Canler, Ancien Chef du Service de Sfireti^ (Ward & Lock, 1862). There
was even a contribution from the anonymous syndicate responsible for the Anonyma
series (see Mr. Sadleir’s essay, p. 159), entitled The Revelations of a Lady Detective
(Vickers, 1864). Clarke’s re-issue of this [1884] is attributed in the British Museum
catalogue to W. S. Hayward, almost certainly incorrectly. All these books were issued
in pictorial boards.

§The first of these, Brought to Bay, or Experiences of a City Detective (Edin-
burgh and Glasgow: Menzies, pictorial boards), was published in 1878, ran through
five editions in eighteen months, and had reached its fifteenth by 1890.

[| Clues, or Leaves from a Chief Constable's Note Book (Edinburgh: OMphant,
Anderson & Ferrier, 1889, pictorial boards).

f Moser afterwards conducted a paper called The Modern Detective, which began
in 1898.

Collecting Detective Fiction 469

In fact, towards the end of the century the “below stairs” school
of detective fiction gradually split into two branches, as its chief
vehicle, the yellow-back, became obsolete. On the one side it turned
to fact; * on the other it joined up with that huge stream of “bloods”
which had run so strongly all through the Victorian period. Hogarth
House, sponsors of Jack Harkaway and many other heroic figures,
ran a department of their Gem Pocket Library which offered de-
tective stories of “128 pages of new and original text, illustrated, in
coloured wrappers” at twopence a volume. The People* s Pocket
Story Books were only threepence each, and the series contained
many of the early exploits of the celebrated Nick Carter ^ a detective
who later gave his name to a weekly magazine and ran Sexton
Blake f close for the blue ribbon of the popular priced field. Nor
was the Aldine Publishing Company left behind: in May, 1899,
the titles in its series of Detective Tales (twopence each) had reached
256, and it numbered on its staff Detectives Thrash and Pulcher,
Harry Hunter the Bootblack Detective, and Daisy Bell, the Pave-
ment Detective.

Turning to the more literary type of detective story, we find, as
is natural, that fewer names have been overlooked by the historians,
anyway before 1890, when the success of Holmes began seriously
to affect output. The Disappearance of Jeremiah Redworth by Mrs.
J. H. Riddell, shows some interesting features for its early date
(Routledge, [1878], pictorial wrappers), but it is much inferior to
Fort Minster^ M.F., A Westminster Mystery by Sir Edward J. Reed
(Bristol, Arrowsmith, 1885, printed wrappers), in which the de-
tective, Strange, gives a very capable performance. There are, more-
over, in Almack the Detective , by E. H. Cragg ([The London
Literary Society, 1886]), some remarkably early applications of sci-
entific processes to detection, including deductions from blood cor-
puscles and microscopic photographs of the corpse’s, eyes, showing
a blurred reflection of the murderers face. H. F. Wood’s The
Passenger from Scotland Yard and The Englishman of the Rue

* In such books as Masterpieces of Crime, by A. van Dam (Eden, Remington &
Co., 1892, printed boards).

f Sexton Blake is the eponymous hero of what became a large syndicate of
detective authors. The significance ‘of the cycle is discussed by Miss Sayers {pp, ciL,

p. 16)

4:^0 John Carter

Cain * deserve to be noticed, as also does The Queen Anne’s Gate
Mystery f by Richard Arkwright, if only for its modern-sounding
title. “Dick Donovan’' (Joyce Emmerson Muddock) is a much more
considerable figure. Cast often in the form of the Waters-Martel
“Reminiscences,” his numerous books show a high level of com-
petence, and they were extremely successful. The Man-Hunter
(1888), Caught at Last (1889), Tracked and Taken (1890) were all
published by Chatto & Windus, simultaneously in picture boards
and in cloth. The Man from Manchester (1890) is a full-length
novel, but in Link by Link (1893) Donovan returned to short
stories. J Milton Danvers produced a number of rather sensational
stories during the ’nineties, published in pictorial boards or wrap-
pers by Diprose & Bateman, § and the work of such detectives as
John Pym H and Michael Dred,^ though derivative, is by no means
contemptible. Max Pemberton ff and B. L. Farjeon J J both turned
momentarily from other fields to the detective story, and Milne’s
Express Series included some examples §§ good enough to make one
wish it had had a longer life.

The work of Richard Marsh is more interesting, and in The
Datchet Diamonds^W || The Crime and the Criminal f f and other
books his touch is as effective in detection as it is in that remarkable
horror-story, The Beetle ^ on which his fame to-day is based. Headon

• Both published by Chatto & Windus; the second in 1889, the first in February,
1888, of which I have only seen the second edition, published in September of the
same year. This is a full-blooded yellow-back in style, though the basic colour is in
fact white.

fTwo vols. F. V. White, 1889.

j Other books by Donovan are: A Detective*s Triumph, 1891, picture boards; Dark
Deeds, 1895; The Mystery of Jamaica Terrace, 1896; The Records of Vincent Trill,
1899 — published by Chatto fe Windus.

The Doctor's Crime, or Simply Horrible (1891).

II The Investigations of John Pym, by David Christie Murray (F, V. White, 1895).

^Michael Dred, Detective, by Marie Connor Leighton and Robert Leighton
{Grant Richards, 1899).

-f-j- Jewel Mysteries I Have Known (Ward, Lock & Bowden, 1893).

Samuel Boyd of Catchpole Square (Hutchinson, 1899), etc.

§§ The Rome Express, by Major Arthur Griffiths (1896); The Ivory Queen, by
Norman Hurst (1899). In each case the first issue is scarlet cloth, g,t,, later issues in
picture boards.

II j[ Ward, Lock & Co. (1898). It is possible that the issue of this book in (a) red
cloth, uncut, and (h) picture boards, cloth back, cut edges, were simultaneous; but if
there is any priority the usual practice of Ward, Lock at this time argues in favour
of (a).

f f Ward, Lock 8c Co. (1897).

Collecting Detective Fiction 471

Hill, too, ill deserves his oblivion: Clues from a Detective's Camera
(Bristol, Arrowsmith, [1893], printed wrappers) and Zambra the
Detective (Chatto & Windus, 1894) were followed by a number of
other competently written stories.*

There are innumerable lesser names, and it must suffice here
to pick out half a dozen or so for mention. George R. Sims is chiefly
remembered for The Dagonet Ballads^ but he also wrote two de-
tective books, The Case of George Candlemas (Chatto & Windus,
1899, pictorial wrappers) and Dorcas Dene^ Detective (F. V. White,
1897, issued simultaneously in pictorial wrappers and in cloth).
M. McDonnell Bodkin, Q.C., was responsible for Paul Beckj the
Rule of Thumb Detective and also for another lady detective,
Dora Myrl.J G. W. Appleton,§ E. W. Hornung, the creator of Raf-
fles, H Burford Delannoy,^ A. C. Fox Davies,ff the authority on
heraldry, Jacques Futrelle,|J Major Griffiths, Arthur W. March-
mont §§ all contributed work of merit; and one author, T. W.
Hanshew, earns a niche apart as having written several detective
novels II II in the style of Amanda McKittrick Ros, with results which
have to be read to be believed. Finally, a tribute must be paid to a
remarkable and inexplicably neglected book, Thrilling Stories of
the Railway (Pearson, 1912, pictorial wrappers) by Victor L. White-

♦ E.g., Guilty Gold (Pearson, 1896); Tracked Down (Pearson, 1902); Her Grace at
Bay (Cassell, 1906); Links in the Chain (Long, 1909); The Comlyn Alibi (Ward, Lock,
1916).

f Pearson, 1898. This was followed by The Quests and The Capture of Paul Beck,
published by Fisher Unwin in 1908 and 1909 respectively.

J Chatto & Windus (1900). Lady detectives are uncommon and, on the whole,
undistinguished. Other examples are found in Wilkie Collins’ No Name (three vols.,
Sampson Ix>w, 1863) and The Law and the Lady (three vols., Chatto & Windus,
1875); Baroness Orczy’s iMdy Molly of Scotland Yard (Cassell, 1910); and a curious
American work, Clarice Dyke the Female Detective, of which I have only seen the
redssue of 1883. Some others are listed by Miss Sayers {op, cit, p, 15).

§ Frangois the Valet (Pearson, 1899); The Silent Passenger (Long, 1906).

[| The Shadow of the Rope (Chatto & Windus, 1902).

^ The Margate Murder Mystery (Ward, Lock, 1902).

ff T/ie Dangennlle Inheritance and The Mauleverer Murders, both published by
Lane in 1907.

The Thinking Machine (Chapman & Hall, 1907); The Professor on the Case
(Nelson, 1909); The Master Hand (Hodder & Stoughton, 1914).

§§4 Millionaire Girl (Cassell, 1908); The Eagrave Square Mystery (Hodder &
Stoughton, 1912).

II II The Mallison Mystery (Ward, Lock, 1903); The Man of the Forty Faces (Cassell,

1910)-

472 John Carter

church, who has recently come into his own with Shot on the
Downs * and other detective stories.

RARITIES AND POINTS

It remains finally to consider two aspects of the subject which are
particularly pertinent to the actual collecting of the detective fic-
tion: bibliographical points and relative scarcities; and in the
present immature stage of this branch of collecting activity such
remarks as can be offered must necessarily be tentative in character.

There is, of course, no need to emphasise the rarity of some of
the more important material. The collector will be fortunate if he
can secure the corner-stones — Poe’s Tales;\ The Moonstone, A
Study in Scarlet, % The Leavenworth Case, The Mystery of a Han-
som Cab, The Red Thumb Mark, The Cask and so on — without a
very considerable expenditure of patience; and the first three will
cost him money into the bargain. As with other forms of collecting,
it will be found that the first book of any author is nearly always
hard to come by, and the perishable format in which so many of
the most covetable detective items first appeared ensures them a
permanent standard of scarcity in any sort of decent condition. The
yellow-backs, for instance, are practically impossible in fine orig-
inal state and extremely uncommon even re-bound; the same ap-
plies to the first English editions of Gaboriau (Boisgobey is com-
paratively common), and here the situation is complicated further
by the difficulty of establishing the dates of the first Vizetelly edi-
tions with any certainty. Reprints are often undifferentiated except
(in some cases) by date, and the information supplied by The Eng-
lish Catalogue is vague. All the early Humes and Donovans are
conspicuously scarce; the Martin Hewitt books are not common,

* Fisher Unwin, 1927.

fFor the bibliographical details, see The Bibliography of Edgar Allan Foe, by
Charles Heartman and Kenneth Rede (Metuchen, New Jersey, 1932).

JThis first appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1887, and although it is
the principal item in the issue it is accompanied by several other stories. The first
book edition was published by Ward, Lock in 1888 (wrappers). Both forms are
very rare. The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes story, first appeared in
LippineotCs Magazine (February 1890) and afterwards in book form as The Sign of
Four from Spencer Blackett in 1890. Of the other Holmes books. The Adventures
(Newnes, 1892) is commonly found in very poor state, while The Return (Newnes,
1905) is actually rarer than either The Adventures or The Memoirs (Newnes, 1894).

Collecting Detective Fiction 473

and the early Thomdykes worse. Most of the obscurer books are
probably so diiBBcult to find only because up to now there has not
been much demand for them.

The first English editions of Leroux and Leblanc are both scarce
and bibliographically complicated. Leroux' The Mystery of the
Yellow Room was issued as No. 54 of the Daily Mail Sixpenny
Novels series, with illustrations by Cyrus Cuneo, in [1908]; in the
following year a slightly different translation appeared in solid book
form from Edward Arnold. Whether the Daily Mail edition has
points connected with its wrappers or advertisements I do not
know; * but it is more than likely, if we may judge from the sequel
story. The Perfume of the Lady in Black, This was No. 72 of the
same series, [1909], and the first issue has yellow ornamental wrap-
pers with a picture by R. Savage in the front centre, printed in
blue, while the list of the series on [a]i verso (facing the half-title)
concludes with No. 71. The second issue has a rose-coloured front
wrapper with a striking picture of the Lady, in black and white,
and the series list goes down to No. 79. As with the parallel cases
of many Arrowsmith books of the 'eighties and 'nineties, there are
probably further issues, only distinguishable in the same way.

Leblanc is equally difficult. The first Arsene Lupin volume to
appear in England was The Seven of Hearts (Cassel, 1908) f and be-
yond its rarity it is not remarkable. The next, however, Arsene
Lupin versus Holmlock Shears (Grant Richards, 1909) f had orig-
inally been entitled The Fair^Haired Lady^ from the longest story
in the book, and at least two copies exist in this suppressed state.
The maroon and black bindings are identical except for the letter-
ing, and the same inserted catalogue (Spring, 1908) occurs in both,
but for the amended form the prelims [A*] were reprinted. The
same book was afterwards published under still another title, The
Arrest of Arsene Lupin (Eveleigh Nash, 191 1). Then of 813, A New
Arsene Lupin Adventure, the first English edition f was published

* The only perfect copies I have ever seen had what I take to be the correct
advertisements — the list of the series stopping at No, 53.

f It is possible that these were preceded by American editions, though the U.S.A.
copyright notices, which in each case give the previous year's date, may of course
refer only to serial or magazine publication.

474 John Carter

by Mills Sc Boon in 1910, and usually contains a thirty-two-page in-
serted catalogue of the same date; but the re-issue of the same sheets
in 1913 bears no obvious indication of its status. It has, however,
a small panel “Price 6/-” at the foot of the pictorial front cover;
the prelims, [A^] have been reprinted, omitting the date; the ad-
vertisements on the outside leaves of the first and last signatures
differ; and the 1910 catalogue is usually replaced by a 1913 one of
the same size.f

CONCLUSION

These observations are based on the experience of only three or
four years' serious attention to the collecting of detective fiction,
and they are offered, therefore, with proper diffidence. Further
attention, and the growth of public demand for the books, will no
doubt bring to light many more bibliographical points, and will
also probably modify any estimates of relative scarcity, I myself
have had the greatest difficulty in running down copies of many
desiderata^ whether among those mentioned in this essay or among
the many for which no space could be found here. And although the
obscurer authors naturally give the most trouble, it is surprising
how elusive several well-known titles by well-known authors have
proved to be.

The evolution of a form of literature which is so much a part of
our daily life as the detective story is a study as fascinating as it is
deserving of serious attention, and from a collector's point of view
it has a host of attractive features. The general outline, and the most
important books, are fairly well known, but there are infinite op-
portunities for exploration among the obscurer authors and large
tracts of practically virgin country. Detective stories have appeared
in every kind of physical form from the full-dress three-volume
novel down to the Detective Supplement of The Union Jack, and
the prevalence of boarded or wrapped ephemera among the less
literary, and therefore socially and historically more interesting
strata, supplies the keenest collector with quarry worthy of his steeL

♦ The original issue had, as a matter of fact, been published at the same price,
f- Other early first English editions of this author are The Crystal Stopper (1913)
and The Teeth of the Tiger (1915), both published by Hurst and Blackett,

Collecting Detective Fiction 475

Finally, pioneer collecting of this kind has one very practical
attraction to offer to its devotees. If it is stimulating to be ahead of
the historian and the bibliographer, it is satisfactory to all of us,
and a sine qua non to many of us, to be ahead of the market. In the
few instances where the collector of detective fiction as such crosses
the path of author collectors — as for instance with Poe, Wilkie
Collins and, to a less extent, Conan Doyle — he will, of course, find
the prices already up; but over practically all the rest of the field
he will find that though these books will cost him time, trouble and
sometimes disappointment, they will not make much demand on
his purse.

The Detective Short Story: The First
Hundred Years
By Ellery Queen

In addition to his other numerous and notable accomplishments,
Ellery Queen is the owner of the most complete library of detective
short stories in existence and is widely recognized as the foremost
authority on that subject. Parenthetically, it may be doubted if any
other writer of detective fiction has demonstrated a comparable de-
votion to his craft and all its lore. The selection which follows is a
1Q46 revision of the introductory essay to Queen's definitive Cen-
tennial anthology, 101 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective
Stories, 1841-1941 {Boston: Little, Brown, 1Q41), Here, historically
and analytically, is all the general reader will wish to know about
the detective short story. The more specialized reader who may
wish to pursue the subject bibliographically is referred, without
question, to the sole and ultimate authority: Queen's full-size vol-
ume The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography {Boston: Little,
Brown, 1942).

o 9 ap p p Qfl p (ifl 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q Q ao 0 0 0 p p 0 0 op 0 0 0 Q^p 0 p 0 Q oiuuuuuuiiuuu^

L Prenatal Note

The first violent crime of literature was a murder, complete with
victim, criminal, motive, and — inferentially — ^weapon; for although
Chapter 4 of Genesis merely remarks: *'Cam rose up against Abel
his brother, and slew him/* we may assume the instrument to have
been a forked-stick plow, or a primitive hoe, since it came to pass
‘*when they were in the field/* and Cain, as everyone knows, was “a
tiller of the ground/*

This historic fratricide nevertheless cannot be said to have initi-

476

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 477

ated the literature of detection for the profound reason that the
case lacked the essential element — a detective. And while the bloody
corpse of history swarms with homicides and inferior crimes, and
literature has fattened on the pleasant details, the simple fact is
that the detective story had to wait upon the detective, and the de-
tective — as we know him today — did not make his d^but on the
human scene until a.d. 1829, when Sir Robert Peel created the first
official police force in London. After all, literature follows man like
a dog, and in this connection man has lagged badly.

A round dozen years after the first bobby, the young editor of a
Philadelphia magazine, Graham's, while pondering the problems
of circulation, wrote a new kind of tale and inserted it — we may
suppose with the twin-barreled anxiety of author and editor — into
one of his issues. Mark well the date — ^April, 1841 — for upon this
date the first detective story the world had ever known was thrust
before its astonished nose.

Many editors since have found that Edgar Allan Poe, in this as
in peculiarly literary matters, was a gentleman of prescience. For
detective stories have saved many a bashful journal from oblivion,
and to say that they have given joy and surcease to multitudinous
millions for three long generations would be merely to repeat a
point grown dull with repetition.

II. The First Hundred Years

Modern readers tend to think of ‘‘detective stories'* as novels,
and admittedly the novels are numberless. But the original, the
“legitimate," form was the short story. The detective novel is a
short story inflated by characterization and description and ro-
mantic nonsense, too often for purposes of padding, and adds only
one innovation to the short-story form: the byplot, or red herring,
which when badly used serves only to irritate when it is meant to
confuse. Poe published the world's first detective short story in
1841, but what is generally considered the world’s first detective
novel — Gaboriau's V Affaire Lerouge — did not appear in Le Pays
until 1866, twenty-five years after “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue."

Notwithstanding the pristine purity of the short form, there has

478 Ellery Queen

been a deplorable tendency among many prominent authors o£
detective fiction to avoid it. Whether this is because in the 20th
Century the publication of detective short stories has proved com-
mercially unprofitable or for some less worthy reason, the fact re-
mains that no short story exists at the time of this writing which
involves Detectives Charlie Chan (Earl Derr Biggers), Nero Wolfe
(Rex Stout), Nick Charles (Dashiell Hammett), Perry Mason (Erie
Stanley Gardner), or Philo Vance (S. S. Van Dine).

For that matter there are other, equally important, detectives of
fiction whose short-story exploits are so few as to escape all but the
keenest-eyed enthusiast. John Rhode’s Dr. Priestley appears in
only two short stories, “The Elusive Bullet” and “The Vanishing
Diamond.” A. E. W. Mason’s Hanaud appears in only one, “The
Affair at the Semiramis Hotel”; Anthony Berkeley’s Roger Shering-
ham in four, “The Avenging Chance,” “White Butterfly,” “The
Wrong Jar,” and “Mr. Bearstowe Says” (the last in Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine, issue of July, 1945); John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Fell
in four, “The Wrong Problem,” “The Proverbial Murder,” “The
Locked Room,” and “A Guest in the House”; Anthony Abbot’s
Thatcher Colt in two, “About the Disappearance of Agatha King”
and “About the Perfect Crime of Mr. Digberry”; and David Fromc’s
Mr. Pinkerton in one, “Policeman’s Cape.”

But if the aforementioned worthies have been remiss, certainly
others have not; and lox Years' Entertainment is dedicated to those
others. The stories in loi Years* Entertainment are not necessarily
“the best”; perfection is a matter of individual judgment, and it
would be presumptuous of us to attempt to canonize for posterity
our betters.

But we can paint a whole picture of what the First Hundred
Years have brought forth by reprinting stories old, derivative, not
so old, recent, and new; representative stories; interesting stories;
unusual stories; the classic greats as well as tales which to the average
reader — indeed, to many an expert — ^are unknown. For we have
kept an eye cocked for that four-leaf clover which is the object of
all who browse in the green pastures of literary research — the “dis-
covery,” the story overlooked by other anthologists. Of such we
have been fortunate to detect a surprising number; and they are
here, in loi Year/ Entertainment^ for your delight. Most readers

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 4^9

know “The Purloined Letter” of Poe, “The Absent-Minded Co-
terie” of Robert Barr, and “The Cyprian Bees” of Anthony Wynne;
but how many know Inspector Barraclough and “The Pink Edge,”
or that fascinating female Gwynn Leith in “The Mackenzie Case”
of Viola Brothers Shore, or “The Two Bottles of Relish,” by Lord
Dunsany, in which an astounding deduction is made by a gentle-
man named Linley — a deduction which, if it were the only one he
ever made (as happens to be the case), would give him automatic
citizenship in the Eternal City of the elite?

For the rest, we give you joy of Doyle’s incomparable Sherlock
Holmes; that hero of your boyhood, Nick Carter; that most dur-
able of Sherlockian imitators, Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt;
scholarly Dr. Thorndyke of R, Austin Freeman; that humble little
genius of the cloth. Father Brown, invented by the master of para-
dox, Gilbert K. Chesterton; Melville Davisson Post’s stalwart, re-
ligious, early-American Uncle Abner; Ernest Bramah’s blind sleuth,
Max Carrados; Agatha Christie’s conceited and delightful ex-
ponent of the little gray cells, M. Hercule Poirot; H. C. Bailey’s
mourning, moaning, indefatigable Mr. Fortune; Dorothy L. Say-
ers’s dilettante Lord Peter Wimsey; and E. C. Bentley’s Philip
Trent of Trent's Last Case renown.

Nor will you take less joy in these less advertised but no less
brilliant lights: M. P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski; Samuel Hopkins
Adams’s Average Jones; Ronald A. Knox’s Miles Bredon; Margery
Allingham’s Albert Campion; Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade;
Pulitzer-Prizewinner T. S. Stribling’s Professor Poggioli; Carter
Dickson’s Colonel March — ^among many others known and un-
known to the connoisseur of the detective short story.

III. Sources and Classifications

What have the First Hundred Years of the detective-crime short
story produced? Let us examine the record.

The two principal sources of the detective-crime short story for
student and lay reader are: periodicals and books. On the number
of such tales published in magazines and newspapers since 1841, no
statistics are available; but certainly their total must run into
astronomical figures. All slick-paper popular magazines at one time

480 Ellery Queen

or another publish detective-crime stories; and among the so-called
“pulps’" of America and England there have been hundreds of
parti-colored publications dedicated vigorously to this brand of
fiction. See your nearest kiosk.

As a rule, the best magazine stories eventually achieve book pub-
lication. This natural winnowing process has been a boon to en-
thusiasts, who may read in one volume the grist of scores of scat-
tered and heterogeneous periodicals. Of course, not all the worthy
stories find a home between hard covers; magazines do yield nug-
gets of gold if only one digs hard and deep enough. We unearthed
Dashiell Hammett’s “A Man Called Spade” in American Maga-
zine, Miss Shore’s “The Mackenzie Case” in a long-deceased maga-
zine named Mystery League, T. S. Stribling’s “The Resurrection
of Chin Lee” in that admirable pulp, Adventure, Octavus Roy
Cohen’s “The Mystery of the Missing Wash” in Saturday Evening
Post, and Pearl S. Buck’s “Ransom” in Cosmopolitan. But these
are exceptions. The point to bear in mind is that, for convenience
and quality, books remain the chief source of the detective-crime
short story.

The volumes in which such tales have been collected may be
divided into seven groups: (a) The short stories of “pure” detec-
tion; (b) books containing tales of mixed types; (c) books of crook
short stories; (d) parodies and pastiches of Sherlock Holmes;
(e) pseudo-real life tales; (f) secret service stories; and (g) antholo-
gies.

IV. The Short Story of **Pure” Detection

Considering the virulence of the literary bug and its affinity
for all manner of hosts, the first century since Poe has produced a
remarkably small number of books of detective short stories. One
reason for this we have already mentioned: even detective-story
writers must live, and such books do not sell. It is interesting in
this connection to note the extremes to which some authors (or
their publishers) have resorted to keep from their innocent patrons,
in whom this prejudice against volumes of short stories generally
persists, the fact that a given book is a book of short stories. The
favorite device is to disguise the book as ^ novel. This feat of pub-

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 481

lishing magic is achieved by editorial and typographic legerdemain
— dividing the book into “chapters’* instead of candidly separate
stories. Such business psychology no doubt dictated the interior
format of, among many others, Robert Barr’s The Triumphs of
Eugene Valmont (1906), Jacques Futrelle’s The Thinking Machine
on the Case (1908), Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner
(1909), T. W. Hanshew’s Cleek, the Man of the Forty Faces (1910),
Melville Davisson Post’s The Nameless Thing (1912), and Herbert
Jenkins’s Malcolm Sage, Detective (1921).

The last word in this bibliodeception is illustrated by M. Mc-
Donnell Bodkin’s Young Beck, a very scarce book published in
1911 by T. Fisher Unwin of London. Typographically, this book
was also set up to look like a novel; not only was it divided into
chapters, with individual chapter-titles, but it was also divided into
parts — Part I, Part 11 , and Part III. The truth is, however, the book
consists of twelve separate and distinct short stories, each composed
of two chapters, and with no inter-relationship of plot. The height
of the deception was reached in the eighth story: the first half of
this story is the last “chapter” of Part II, and the second half of
the story is the first “chapter” of Part IIIl

If the number of books of detective short stories of all types is
surprisingly small, the number of those of the “pure” detection
type is amazingly so. Only 347 known titles of this type exist, break-
ing down into three classifications: (1) 305 about male detectives,
like Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Mr. Fortune; (2) 35 about
female detectives — ^from C. L. Pirkis’s Loveday Brooke (1894) and
George R, Sims’s Dorcas Dene (1897) to the more modern Mme.
Storey (1926) of Hulbert Footner, Mignon Eberhart’s Susan Dare
(1934), and the Coles’ Mrs. Warrender (1939); and (3) 7 about
boy detectives. Five of these last concern the adventures in detec-
tion of young P. J. Davenant written by Lord Frederic Hamilton;
the other two are The Adventures of Detective Barney by Harvey
J. O’Higgins and Bang! Bang! by George Ade, about Eddie Parks,
the Newsboy Detective.

Of the 347 volumes of stories of “pure” detection, 56 are the work
of only 5 authors! These fertile scriveners are Dick Donovan (be-
lieve it or not, once an immensely popular writer — ^his real name
was Joyce Emmerson Muddock); Gilbert K. Chesterton^ who ere-

482 Ellery Queen

ated not only Father Brown but also Horne Fisher, Mr. Pond, and
Gabriel Gale; Arthur B. Reeve, creator of Craig Kennedy and Con-
stance Dunlap; Agatha Christie; and H. C. Bailey. This leaves a
mere 291 books of “pure” detective short stories written by all the
rest of mankind since 1841! And many of these 291 volumes are
so scarce today as to be virtually unobtainable — ^such rarities as
Headon HilFs Zambra the Detective (1894); David Christie Mur-
ray's The Investigations of John Pym (1895); H. Frankish’s Dr.
Cunliffe^ Investigator (1902); Duncan Dallas’s Paul Richards, De-
tective (1908); Victor Whitechurch’s Thrilling Stories of the Rail-
way (1912), about Thorpe Hazell, detective; Cecil Henry Bulli-
vant’s Garnett Bell, Detective (1920); Scott Campbell's paperbacks
about Detective Felix Boyd; and numerous others.

V. The Books of '"Mixed Types**

To add to the labors of the research worker, many books exist
whose stories are not exclusively devoted to the adventures of a
single detective. In such collections of stories a tale of “pure” de*
tection may be smothered under a haystack of straight mystery
stories, or stories of crime-sam-detection. Such a heterogeneous
volume is Anna Katharine Green’s Masterpieces of Mystery (1913)
— surely the publisher’s title, which he regretted, for six years later
it was reissued under the new title Room Number 5. J. S. Fletcher
is the author of many such: The Secret of the Barbican (1924),
The Malachite Jar (1930), etc. Prolific as he was, Fletcher produced
only two volumes of stories of “pure” detection: The Adventures
of Archer Dawe, Sleuth-Hound (1909) and Paul Campenhaye:
Specialist in Criminology (1918). The books of William LeQueux
often concern a single central character (as In Secret, 1920; Bleke
the Butler, 1923; and others) but the tales are nonetheless of the
mixed type — ^some detection, some mystery, some crime, and some
out-and-out adventure.*

There are 350 titles in this “mixed-type” group. It should be
noted that this figure does not include all the E. Phillips Oppen-

* The most important exception is LeQneux's Mysteries of a Great City (1919)

which are the reminiscences of M. Raoul Becq, ex-sous-chef of the Sfiret^ GMxsdc
of Paris, consistently tales of *‘purc** detection.

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 483

heim’s books o£ short stories, which alone number 38. Most of these
are not properly books of detection or crime, being of the adventure-
spy-international-intrigue school. Oddly enough, for all his literary
virility Oppenheim has fathered few books of “pure’* detection:
such works as The Hon. Algernon Knox, Detective (1920); Nicho-
las Goade, Detective (1927); and Slane's Long Shots (1930) are
almost lost in the crowd.

Even more exasperating to the bibliophilous Nimrod (and, by
the identical token, upon discovery more satisfying) is the occa-
sional publication of a volume of short stories by an author distin-
guished in a field of writing other than detection-crime. Here the
ardent explorer may be pardoned if his foot slips, for who would
normally associate W. W. Jacobs with detective tales, or Aldous
Huxley, or Ben Hecht, or W. Somerset Maugham? Yet these literary
respectables are merely a few who have composed stories of
detection-crime. Jacobs has at least two in his The Lady of the
Barge (1902). Huxley has one, the unforgettable “The Gioconda
Smile,” in Mortal Coils (1922). Ben Hecht succumbed to the virus
in his book. The Champion From Far Away (1931); he is also the
author of a detective story, “The Mystery of the Fabulous Laundry-
man,” included with three other murder stories in Actor's Blood
(1936). And W. Somerset Maugham has a story called “Footprints
in the Jungle,” in Ah King (1933), which any self-respecting hunter
must include in his bag.

Other celebrities of letters who have strayed from their custo-
mary habitat into the enchanted land are Owen Johnson in his
volume, Murder in Any Degree (1913), one story in which, “One
Hundred in the Dark,” is especially notable; Stacy Aumonier in
Miss Bracegirdle and Others (1923), which contains at least one
superb tale, “Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty”; Wilbur Daniel
Steele in The Man Who Saw Through Heaven (1927) and Tower
of Sand (1929), containing respectively those brilliant stories, “Blue
Murder” and “Footfalls”; Arnold Bennett in The Night Visitor
(1931), with its unusual tale, “Murder”; and Christopher Morley
whose detective. Dove Dulcet, is to be found in three stories in
Tales From a Rolltop Desk (1921). Famous literary figures who
also “stooped to conquer” include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles
Dickens (we recommend “Hunted Down”), Thomas Hardy, Mark

484 Ellery Queen

Twain (particularly ‘‘The Stolen White Elephant”), Robert Louis
Stevenson, Anton Chekhov, and Rudyard Kipling.

From the obscure dossier of authors not usually linked with
mystery and crime writings, we have reprinted in loi Years' En^
tertainment tales by these other illustrious culprits: Irvin S. Cobb,
Thomas Burke, F. Tennyson Jesse, Hugh Walpole, and Pearl S.
Buck. There are one or two further surprises. Mary Roberts Rine-
hart has written many mystery stories, but who would dream of
Tish as a sleuth? Yet the ineffable Tish is here in all her blithesome
gloryl As is Florian Slappey, that dark harlequin of Birmingham,
in a comic-detective story by Octavus Roy Cohen (whose fat, gold-
toothpick-wielding Jim Hanvey might have done a more workman-
like detecting job than Florian, but surely would not have exe-
cuted it with such rapierlike 61 an).

VI. The Crooks

The names Raffles and Arsine Lupin are so universally familiar
that one would think the bound literature of crooks-in-short-stories
to be a vast continent for exploration. Curiously enough, there are
a mere 100 different book titles — in one hundred years 1 These sing
the roguish escapades of E. W. Hornung’s Raffles; Maurice Le-
blanc’s Arsine Lupin; and Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, alias
the Saint — to mention the best-known. They also include cer-
tain lesser luminaries who nevertheless have shed a scoundrelly
fame: Frederick Irving Anderson’s The Infallible Godahl; Bruce
Graeme’s Blackshirt; Frank Heller’s Mr. Philip Collin; Harry
Stephen Keeler’s DeLancey, King of Thieves; Frank L. Packard’s
Jimmie Dale, alias the Gray Seal; E. Phillips Oppenheim’s Michael
Sayers; Bertram Atkey’s Smiler Bunn; Peter Cheyney’s Alonzo Mac-
Tavish; Rupert Hughes’s Dirk Memling; Herman Landon’s Elu-
sive Picaroon, Martin Dale; May Edginton’s Napoleon Prince; and
Sax Rohmer’s S^verac Bablon. And you, O student, might do worse
than to investigate the assorted sculduggeries of this obscure trio:
Barry Pain’s Constantine Dix (1905), A. C. Fox-Davies’s Sir John
Kynnersley (1908), and Edgar Wallace’s Anthony Newton . . .
What — have we neglected Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay? Inexcus-
able omission! For surely you recall— if you are old enough — that

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 485

engaging rapscallion. The Colonel beat Raffles to it by two years!

But come. Surely the ladies have amassed sufficient loot to merit
inclusion in books of short stories? They have, and their small num-
ber is no reflection on their burglarious daring. These lovely crea-
tures of sin include: Mrs. Raffles (1905), who stalks through the
book of short stories of that name by John Kendrick Bangs, and
who never tackled a 'Job” for less than millions; of course, this is
parody typically Bangsian. Then there are Frederick Irving Ander-
son’s The Notorious Sophie Lang (1925) who lives in that single
volume of stories and, more recently, has been resurrected in mo-
tion pictures; Edgar Wallace’s Four Square Jane (1929); and Roy
Vickers’s The Exploits of Fidelity Dove (1935)*

VIL Parodies and Pastiches of Holmes

A parody is a burlesque imitating some serious work; a pastiche
is usually a serious imitation in the exact manner of the original
author. Only the illustrious call forth such passionate homage; and
in the literature of detection who is more illustrious, as a character
and a catholic institution, than Sherlock Holmes?

The parodies of Holmes far exceed the pastiches, which are rare.
John Kendrick Bangs did lusty work in Sherlockian parody. Stories
of this type may be found in these Bangs volumes: The Pursuit of
the House-Boat (1897), Dreamers: a Club (1899), The En-
chanted Type-Writer (1899), and Potted Fiction (1908). In 1903
Bangs wrote a series of Holmes parodies for newspapers which he
called "Shylock Homes: His Posthumous Memoirs”; these were
never assembled between boards; and in 1906, trifling with genetics,
he created Raffles Holmes, the "son” of Sherlock Holmes and the
"grandson” of A. J. Raffles, whose merry exploits were assembled
under the title R. Holmes if Co.

Robert Barr wrote about Sherlaw Kombs in his story, "The Great
Pegram Mystery” (from the book The Face and the Mask, 1895) —
Barr, you will recall, was the creator of Eugene Valmont who, alas,
has been parodied by no one, Bret Harte came up with Hemlock
Jones in "The Stolen Cigar Case” (from Condensed Novels, 2nd
Series, 1902). Maurice Leblanc, Gallically testing the commercial
possibilities of a marriage of immovable detection and irresistible

486 Ellery Queen

thievery, composed “Holmlock Shears Arrives Too Late,” which
comes from the volume The Exploits of Arsene Lupin (1907), in
which Lupin and Holmes clashed and — this was courteous of Le-
blanc — wound up in a pretty stalemate. Stephen Leacock, refusing
to tamper with the master's Doyle-given name and calling him
simply The Great Detective, parodied Holmes in ''Maddened by
Mystery: or, The Defective Detective,” which you will find in Mr.
Leacock's Nonsense Novels (1911). O. Henry labored to conceive
Shamrock Jolnes — an appealing abortion! — in the tales "The
Sleuths” and "The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes,” to be found
in the otherwise respectable Sixes and Sevens (1911). But for sheer
stupendous imagination we have always bowed in admiration be-
fore the appellative genius of R. C. Lehmann, who gave us The
Adventures of Picklock Holes (1901).

The pastiche, whose intent is serious, and the fashioning of which
requires immense knowledge, discrimination, and courage, is
necessarily a rare literary form. The best pastiche of Sherlock
Holmes is Vincent Starrett’s The Unique Hamlet (1920). William
O. Fuller’s A Night With Sherlock Holmes (1929) also merits your
respectful attention. Other parodies and imitations include Caro-
lyn Wells’s "The Adventure of the Clothes-Line”; A. B. Cox’s
(Anthony Berkeley’s) "Holmes and the Dasher”; Stuart Palmer’s
"The Adventure of the Remarkable Worm”; Sir James M. Barrie’s
"The Adventure of the Two Collaborators”; Mark Twain’s A
Double-Barrelled Detective Story; Logan Clendening’s "The Case
of the Missing Patriarchs”; August Derleth’s "The Adventure of
the Norcross Riddle” (about Solar Pons) — all to be found, with a
complete history of the Holmesian take-off, among the 33 stories
that make up our Sherlockian anthology, The Misadventures
of Sherlock Holmes (1944).

VIII. Pseudo-Real Life Stories

Between 1856 and 1890 detective-crime literature suffered an
epidemic of "realism.” People became interested in crimes that
actually happened and detectives who existed in three-dimensional
form; so a gout of books gushed forth from the presses, professing
to be the memoirs of this police officer or that, many of which were

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 487

fiction concocted by professional writers; and fact and fiction were
so jumbled that today it is difficult to differentiate one from the
other. It is hardly necessary to add that most of these ‘'diaries/’
“reminiscences/’ “memoirs,” and “revelations” of supposedly real-
life policemen were purest balderdash, and consequently few of
them survive; in their original paperback state they are rare.

The survivors include the work of “Waters” (William Russell)
— Recollections of a Detective Police-Officer (1856 and 1859);
Charles Martel’s (Thomas Delf) The Detective's Note-Book (i860);
Lieut.-Col. H. R. Addison’s Dmry of a Judge (i860); James M’Levy’s
Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh (i86i); M. Canler’s Autobiog-
raphy of a French Detective (1863); Andrew Forrester Jr.’s The
Revelations of a Private Detective (1863); Alfred Hughes’s Leaves
from the Note-Book of a Chief of Police (1864); James M’Govan’s
Brought to Bay (1878); William Henderson’s Clues, or Leaves from
a Chief Constable's Note Book (1889); Inspector Maurice Moser’s
Stories from Scotland Yard (1890, in collaboration with Charles
F. Rideal).

The editors know of 40 different titles in this group, although at
the present writing, and after continuous bloodhound trailing, pos-
sess copies of only 22.*

You are not to confuse the above-mentioned group with Allan
Pinkerton’s legitimate memoirs in Thirty Years a Detective (1884)
and Arthur Train’s (creator of Mr. Tutt) in True Stories of Crime
(1908), among many others, including the famous Major Arthur
Griffiths’s Mysteries of Police and Crime (1898) and even Memoir es
de Vidocq (1828-1829). These are the true constellations, and do
not come within our orbit, which is thick with the planetary bodies
of fiction.

IX. Secret Service Stories

Among the looo-odd books which represent the entire publish-
ing output of detective-crime short stories in the first one hundred

♦ Exclusive of '*pseudo-real life’" books, the Ellery Queen library of detective-crime
short story volumes is at this writing 90% complete. But for research purposes
connected with roi Fears" Entertainment we had access to most of the volumes
missing from the Queen collection, thanks chiefly to E. T. (Ned) Guymon Jr. of San
Diego, Califomia, who possesses the largest library of mystery fiction (in total
number of volumes) in the world.

488 Ellery Queen

years, only a handful, surprisingly enough, are devoted exclusively
to the machinations of secret service agents. Of course many of
the demi-detectives created by E. Phillips Oppenheim, William
LeQueux, and Sax Rohmer flirt constantly with international in-
trigue, but few of their books deal wholly with diplomatic sculdug-
gery; and occasionally one of the great manhunters of fiction takes
a fling at counter-espionage — Sherlock Holmes, for example, in
“The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” and “His Last
Bow” — but these are random shots in otherwise stately, if not
affairs-of-stately, careers.

Perhaps the finest of all English books of secret service stories is
W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928).
Here the emphasis is not on plot, in the usual blood-and-thunder
sense; Maugham is too crafty a craftsman to subordinate the higher
virtues of compelling realism and depth of characterization to tricks
and counter-tricks. Much closer, however, to the conventional con-
ception of secret agents are the exploits of William Dawson in The
Lost Naval Papers (1917), by Bennet Copplestone; The Adventures
of Heine (1919), by Edgar Wallace; and the secret service tales
in Valentine Williams’s The Knife Behind the Curtain (1930).
Even the English boy-detective has taken a whack at the insidious
and sinister spy — witness the two books about PJ., the Secret
Service Boy (1922-1923), by Lord Frederic Hamilton; PJ. is, of
course, young Philip John Davenant. And if memory serves,
Headon Hill’s Sebastian Zambra saves Britain from a fate worse
than death in one of the stories that make up Cabinet Secrets (1893).
Thus, from Ashenden to Zambra . . .

In America, the secret service sleuths include George Bronson-
Howard’s Yorke Norroy in Norroy, Diplomatic Agent (1907),
Slaves of the Lamp (1917), and The Black Book (1920) — Norroy
derives from the Graustarkian school of diplomatic detectives;
Clarence Herbert New’s Lord Trevor (an American despite his
title) in The Unseen Hand (1918); R. T. M. Scott’s Secret
Service Smith (1923), first name Aurelius; and Melville Davis-
son Post’s Walker of the Secret Service (1924). There are others,
on both sides of the Atlantic, but not enough to fill a five-foot
sheli

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 489
X. Anthologies

It goes without saying that where joy is truly precious, it begs to
be communicated; and so it is not wonderful that detective-story
anthologies should spring up and multiply like unregimented rab-
bits. The number of anthologies is relatively high — 135 known vol-
umes, and at least half a dozen more in preparation (being edited by
Lee Wright, Howard Hay craft, ourselves, and others).

The earliest legitimate anthology was published by Chapman &
Hail in London in 1895. It was called The Long Arm if Other De-
tective Stories; Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman) contributed “The Long
Arm” and George Ira Brett (later known as Oswald Crawfurd), Roy
Tellet, and Professor Brander Matthews contributed the “Others.”
This pioneer work was followed (circa 1897) by the paperback
Diprose's Annuals which technically are anthologies because they
contain some mystery-crime short stories by a variety of authors.
The first American anthology did not appear until 1906: Vol. I
(called Detective Stories) in the g-volume set entitled Great Short
Stories, edited by William Patten. Perhaps the first specialized an-
thology was Twenty-Five Tales of the Railway (Newnes, 1909),
stories of crime, adventure, and detectives, but all on railway
themes. A great many of the 1 35 known anthologies were published
in England only; because of the war they are now virtually impos-
sible to procure.

It is not remarkable that detective-story writers themselves should
be prominent among the anthologists. For one thing, the writer in
this field who has made his mark is generally infected with a pride
of profession and an irresistible desire to build a better anthology
— “a truly definitive job, you knowl”^ — than anyone living or dead.
For another, it is the only certain method of immortalizing one of
one’s own stories. At any rate, we have had numerous professional
anthologists, among them Carolyn Wells, S. S. Van Dine, Vincent
Starrett, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald A. Knox (with H. Harrington),
Dashiell Hammett (more strictly a supernatural anthology), E. C.
Bentley, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Raymond Postgate, John Rhode,
Peter Cfieyney, Anthony Boucher, atid (work in progress) John
Dickson Carr.

49^ Ellery Queen

The value of the anthology to both student and lay reader is
threefold: (a) It often contains short stories which never saw book
publication and are taken directly from periodicals and original
manuscripts, (b) It keeps alive the best work of the older authors,
whose books have been long out of print and would not therefore
be available to present-day readers. (It can be said with exact truth
that characters like The Old Man in the Corner and Eugene Val-
mont owe their continued existence wholly to anthologists.) And
(c) it memorializes the best stories of modern authors.

XL Apology and Good Wishes

So there are the statistics of the First Hundred Years of the
detective-crime short story. In loi Years* Entertainment we have
tried to range over as wide a terrain of places, authors, subjects, fa-
mous characters, and “discoveries** as possible in commemoration
of the centennial event; but of course space limitations have forced
us to be cruelly selective, and there are many excellent detectives
and samples of their investigations which have had to be omitted.
Perhaps a short auxiliary list of authors and titles would, to some
degree, make up for these enforced omissions. We especially com-
mend to your attention (if you can find the books!) the following:

Edwin Balmer’s and William MacHarg*s The Achievements of
Luther Trant (1910); Tram was the first detective to employ
the then-newfangled science of psychology as a method of crime-
detection — ^including the first use in fiction of the “lie-detector,**
although Craig Kennedy (of Arthur B. Reeve) ran Trant a close
second as a scientific psychologist. Francis Lynde*s Scientific
Sprague (1912). Hesketh Prichard's November Joe (1913), the only
backwoods detective on record, a sort of detecting Leatherstocking.
Octavus Roy Cohen’s Jim Hanvey^ Detective (1923). Basil Thom-
son’s Mr. Pepper^ Investigator (1925), a rara avis indeed: the comic
detective. Edgar Wallace’s The Orator (1928), about Chief In-
spector O. Rater, a little-known Wallace character and yet, next to
Mr. J. G. Reeder, Wallace’s best sleuth. Nicholas Olde’s The In^
credible Adventures of Rowland Hern (1928). Harvey J, O’Hig-
gins’s Detective Duff Unravels It (1929), literature’s first approach
to a psychoanalytical detective. Percival Wilde’s Rogues In Clover

Detective Short Story: The First Hundred Years 491

(1929), about Bill Parmelee, who specializes in card and gambling
mysteries. Henry Wade*s Policeman*s Lot (1933), about Inspector
Poole, very Scotland Yard. Kenneth Livingston’s The Dodd Cases
(1934), about Cedric Dodd, a physician-detective. And C. Daly
King’s The Curious Mr. Tarrant (1935), a collection of eight stories
and one of the most imaginative books of detective short stories to
appear in the last decade.

So here’s to crime, to detection — ^and to the Second Hundred
Years 1

Readers’ Guide to Crime

By James Sandoe

So much for the professional book-collector and the specialist. For
less exacting readers who like to fill their library shelves with tried
favorites for fireside rumination, unmindful of edition, condition,
or purely historical significance, the list which follows by an out-
standmg contemporary scholar of The Blood {though compiled
originally for college library use) will be a veritable boon.

Your editor owns to three principal reasons for printing Mr.
Sandoe' s Honor Roll of Crime Fiction: (j) its sound modernity and
refreshing iconoclasm both in selection and annotation; (2) the
fact that it represents the judgment of not one but several informed
and discriminating minds; and ( 5 ) the fun of talking back to Mr.
Sandoe and his collaborators — an opportunity I know {let's drop
the third person for awhile) many fellow addicts will envy, for in
no precinct of modern letters are preferences and antipathies more
personal or strongly held.

With Mr. Sandoe's main selection of authors, few readers, 1 be-
lieve, will quarrel seriously, nor will many important omissions of
individual writers be found {though the absences of R. A. J. Wall-
ing, Edgar Wallace, Phoebe Atwood Taylor and her alter ego Alice
Tilton, and Patrick Quentin and his other self Jonathan Stagge,
are disturbing and difficult to comprehend). My own disagreements
are chiefly zvith some of the titles chosen. For example, I cannot
understand how so perceptive a group of critics could name Ray-
mond Chandler's The High Window to the exclusion of his Fare-
well My Lovely (ipjo), to my mind the finest single performance
in the mannered hardboiled division since Hammett. Likewise, I
side with those readers who find Eric Ambler's Journey Into Fear
{1940) preferable to his more highly polished and publicized Coffin
for Dimitrios, if only for the reason that the peril in the former is

* Assistant Professor of Bibliography and English Literature, in charge of Order
Diwion, University of Colorado Libraries.

492

Readers* Guide to Crime

493

genuine because inescapable; in the latterj synthetic, 1 am moved
to a protest of some violence by the choice of Dorothy Hughes* com-
paratively routine The Fallen Sparrow, when the selectors might
have named her first novel The So Blue Marble (1^40), an unforget-
table experience in contemporary sensation fiction. I find^ in fact,
a hitherto unsuspected predilection for early efforts: I would in-
clude Rex Stout* s Fer de Lance {1934), the Lockridges* The Norths
Meet Murder (1940), Timothy Fuller* s Harvard Has a Homicide
(15)56), H. C. Bailey* s early Joshua Clunk story The Red Castle
Mystery (19^2), Georgette Heyer*s Merely Murder {193^), Hilda
Lawrence* s Blood Upon the Snow {1944), and E. H. Clements* Let
Him Die {1939) — all first or early novels — in place of the later (and
in my opinion inferior) titles selected by Mr. Sandoe and his col-
leagues to represent these authors. ... I am grateful for the op-
portunity to amend publicly an earlier judgment of my own with
regard to that highly important Anglo-American writer John Dick-
son Carr under his two signatures. In a list published some years
ago I chose The Arabian Nights Murder to represent Carr and
The Plague Court Murders to stand for Carter Dickson. After
careful, and possibly maturer, re-reading I beg to change my vote
to The Crooked Hinge (1938) by Carr as imaginatively outstanding
among Dr. FelVs many superlative performances and The Judas
Window (1938) by Dickson (included in the Sandoe list) as the
most brilliant of Sir Henry Merrivale*s deductive achievements.

As Mr. Sandoe has no doubt discovered, the penalty of the un-
restricted bibliography which admits '‘borderliners** of any kind
to the sacred premises (as contrasted with the limited or ^'classic**
list) is that once the gates are open it is almost impossible to check
the flood. If Rogue Male is included here, why not Ethel Vance* s
Escape (1939): not to mention Philip MacDonald* s fine and too-
little-known pursuit-classic of the same title, published in 1932} If
Graham Greene* s suspenseful entertainments** belong, what about
Helen Macinnes* Above Suspicion (1941)7 If there is room for
A Bullet in the Ballet, why leave out Elliot PauVs comparably
hilarious Mysterious Micky Finn (1939) and its vinous progeny?
If the merely historical Achievements of Luther Trant is admissi-
ble, how exclude Frederick Irving Anderson*s rich and rewarding
Book of Murder (1930), or even his early Godahl and Sophie Lang

494 James Sandoe

crook adventures? If the supernatural overtones of He Arrived at
Dusk are legitimized, for our purposes, by the novel's strain of
sleuthing, why not stretch the point only a little farther to admit
Henry James* The Turn of the Screw {i8p8) and Dorothy Macar-
die's The Uninvited {1942)} If Raoul Whitfield comes within the
canon, how deny entry to James M. Cain with his The Postman
Always Rings Twice {1934) and Double Indemnity {1943)? And
why, in heaven's name, omit for any reason Daphne Du Maurier's
Rebecca (19^8), one of the indisputable mystery classics of this gen-
eration for all that it was accepted by the Philistines as a '"novel"?

These are details. Mr. Sandoe' s list, or so it seems to me, has also
one generic shortcoming: a tendency to minimize the American
medium-to-hard-boiled school of crime writing which, while ad-
mittedly beginning to pay the penalty for careless craftsmanship
and excess, has nevertheless done so much to re-vitalize and sustain
the form in the last decade-and-a-half. T o remedy this vitamin de-
ficiency, I would salt the list with a few novels of the type and range
of, say, David Dodge's Death and Taxes {x94i)> Hugh Pentecost's
Cancelled in Red {1939), Cleve Adams' Sabotage {1940), Robert
George Dean's Murder by Marriage {1940), and/or the reader's
own favorites from the works of such familiars of the "private eye"
as Whitman Chambers, George Harmon Coxe, John Spain, C. W.
Grafton, H. W. Roden, Brett Halliday, and Dana Chambers.

In the non-tough or general category, some further authors and
volumes I think might be profitably added to so broadly based a
shelf-list as enjoyable and above-the-average representatives of their
several styles are — strictly at random and as they come to mind:
Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson's Re-Enter Sir John {1932),
Richard Keverne's The Man in the Red Hat (1930), Bernard Capes'
The Skeleton Key {X919), Katherine Woods' Murder in a Walled
Town (1934), David Keith's A Matter of Iodine {1940), Virginia
Perdue's He Fell Down Dead {1943) or Alarum and Excursion
{x944)f Patrick Quentin's A Puzzle for Fools {X93S), Elizabeth
Dean's Murder Is a Collector’s Item {X939), J. H. Wallis' Once Off
Guard (“The Woman in the Window”) {1942), Theodora Du Bois'
Death Wears a White Coat {1938), Dorothy Cameron Disney's The
Balcony {X940), Doris Miles Disney's Compound for Death {X943),
Richard Marsh's The Beetle (xpiy), Lord Chamwood's Tracks in

Readers* Guide to Crime 495

the Snow (ipoS), of more than historical interest ^ Valentine Wil-
liams* The Portcullis Room (1^54), Margaret Millafs The Iron
Gates {1945), Allan Bosworth*s Full Crash Dive (1942), Anthony
Rolls* Clerical Error {1932), Virgil Markham* s Death in the Dusk
{1928), Vera Caspary*s Laura (1943), E, C. Bentley* s Trent’s Own
Case {1936), C. H. B, Kitchin*s Death of My Aunt (1930), P. W.
Wihon*s Bride’s Castle (1944), R, C. Woodthorpe*s Rope for a Con-
vict {1940), Baynard Kendrick*s The Odor of Violets {1941), Sam-
uel Rogers* Don’t Look Behind You! {1944), Phoebe Atwood Tay-
lor*s The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), Alice Tilton* s The Cut Direct
{1938), Edgar Wallace* s The Murder Book of J. G. Reeder {1926),
R.A.J. WalUng*s The Fatal Five Minutes {1932), Jonathan Stagge*s
The Stars Spell Death {1939)^ James Norman* s Murder Chop Chop
{1942), Victor Luhrs* The Longbow Murder {1941), a curiosity,
Henry Wade*s The Duke of York’s Steps {1929), Rosemary Kutak*s
Darkness of Slumber {1944), A. R, Hilliard*s Justice Be Damned
{1941), Eden Phillpotts* The Grey Room {1921), Anne Hockingfs
Deadly Is the Evil Tongue {1940), William Gillette*s The Astound-
ing Crime in Torrington Road {192^), and two anthologies for
connoisseurs compiled by the membership of the Detection Club
of London, The Floating Admiral (1932) and Ask a Policeman

{1933)-

But now — at long last! — Mr. Sandoe.
iUUUlilMJi 0 0 0 0 0 ft 0 0 0 0 p 0 Q 0 0 0 0 ft 0 0 <5 0 0 p 0 ^ Q 0 0 Qt ,0 0 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 o_ 0 0 9

For twenty-five years now critics have been defending the de-
tective story as a form against an opposition which, twenty-five
years ago, was not very determined and which is now little more
than a voiceless superstition. ‘‘All professors read detective stories”
is a new truism which observation bears out astonishingly. But
however many professors read detective stories, few if any university
libraries possess any systematic collection of detective fiction.

Public libraries, gauged to meet popular taste, usually have
large collections; but even these are not commonly designed to
stand except accidentally and temporarily as an historical view of
the form. Too. detective stories in public libraries, worn and re-

4g6 James Sandoe

bound and cracked and patched, eventually wear out and few li-
braries have budgets large enough to replace older detective stories
(even the best of them) and keep up with the spate of new ones, good
and bad, which must be bought to placate readers. Rental library
collections change with each season*s new books. Only in a few
private collections, not accessible to the general public and not
generally accessible to the student, can any systematic survey of the
history of the detective story at its best be found.

Now the astonishing bulk of the form (recently one of every
four new works of fiction) alone will ultimately necessitate atten-
tion, even from that anomaly, the inimical professor, if he is to be
a complete scholar. And it is not the bulk of the form nor its wide
popularity, but its vigor, its ingenuity and — latterly — its literacy,
its curiosity, its deeper interest in character which have won it seri-
ous attention and respect as a portion of literature.

With some notion in mind of pointing out a responsibility of uni-
versity libraries to collect detective stories, I drew up a preliminary
list of “tecs’" from two earlier and designedly limited bibliographies
by Howard Haycraft.* This new list, observing sundry omissions
and many additions, was designed to sketch the form’s history, but
even more to gather its excellencies and its varieties in puzzling,
literacy, and vigor. This revised list, submitted to a number of
critics, writers, editors, and readers, was subjected to their scru-
tiny and their often vigorous exclamation, demanding omission
or addition. Thus corrected the list was published, under the title
“The Detective Story and Academe,” in the Wilson Library Bulletin
for April 1944, where it aroused some interest and comment. It
has now been further revised (through 1945) and corrected by the
compiler at the suggestion of the editor of the present volume.
Bibliographical details have been held to a minimum in the list.
Many of the titles it notes are out of print in the original editions
but nearly all are pretty easily obtainable at second hand, or — for
the private library — in the several series of paperback reprints.

• “From Poe to Hammett; a Foundation List of Detective Fiction/' in Wilson
Library Bulletin, February 1938, p. 371-77, and “A Detective Story Bookshelf/*
Chapter XIV in his Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story,

Readers' Guide to Crime

497

ANTHOLOGIES

Boucher, Anthony, pseud. (White, William A. P.) ed. Great American
Detective Stories (1945) a fresh and admirable selection, with stimu-
lating notes.

Haworth, Peter, ed. Before Scotland Yard: Classic Tales of Roguery and
Detection, Ranging from the Apocrypha to Charles Dickens (1927).
Vincent Starrett points this out as “an excellent anthology of in-
cunabula.”

Queen, Ellery, pseud. (Dannay, Frederic and Lee, Manfred) ed. loi
Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1^41. The
best, most comprehensive collection. Starrett would add “all the
Queen anthologies as they appear.” These include Challenge to the
Reader (1938) in which twenty-four famous detectives appear with
their names altered, the challenge being to identify the detective
from his manner and the story’s; Sporting Blood: The Great Sports
Detective Stories (1942), The Female of the Species: The Great
Women Detectives and Criminals (1943), The Misadventures of
Sherlock Holmes (1944), and Rogues' Gallery: The Great Criminals
of Modern Fiction (1945). With these should certainly be noted EF
levy Queen's Mystery Magazine which, since its first issue in 1941, has
distinguished itself for the unusual diversity and quality of its stories,
old and new.

Rhode, John, pseud. (Street, Cecil John Charles) ed. Detection Medley
(London, 1939) stories and articles by members of The Detection
Club. A selection from this excellent collection was published in this
country as Line-Up (1940).

Sayers, Dorothy L,, ed. The Omnibus of Crime (1929), The Second
Omnibus of Crime (1932), The Third Omnibus of Crime (1935).
is a mixture of tales of detection and stories of unconfined mystery
and horror. The introduction to the first omnibus is a brilliant and
concise introduction to the form, equalled only by Miss Sayers’ intro-
duction to still another anthology, Tales of Detection (London, 1936),
Starrett, Vincent, ed. World's Great Spy Stories (1944). The first Amer-
ican collection of the sort, urbanely annotated.

Five other anthologies may be noted briefly: Sleuths, ed. by Kenneth
Macgowan (1931), World's Best Detective Stories, ed. by Eugene
Thwing (1929) a very uneven collection in ten small volumes but con-
taining much not easily accessible elsewhere; Great Detective Stories
(1927) ed. by Willard Huntington Wright (S. S. Van Dine) with a sound

498 James Sandoe

introduction; Crime and Detection (1926) with an introduction by
E. M. Wrong; and Fourteen Great Detective Stories^ ed. by Vincent
Starrett (1928).

NOVELS AND TALES

Allingham, Margery. Death of a Ghost (1934) and Flowers for the Judge
(1936). Miss Allingham^s stories are of such quality that nearly all of
her later novels are mentioned. Her earlier tales (before Police at the
Funeral, 1931), although they present the same detective, Albert Cam-
pion, are farcical thrillers rather than tales of detection.

Ambler, Eric. A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) although Anthony Boucher
and Helen E. Haines would have four of Ambler's novels in the
omnibus volume Intrigue (1943).

Ashby, R. C. He Arrived at Dusk (1933) an extraordinary tale of terror.

Bailey, H. C. Meet Mr. Fortune (1942) contains a biographical note
about Dr. Reginald, a novel (The Bishop's Crime) and twelve short
stories from earlier collections. In Orphan Ann (1941) appears
Bailey's other detective, that pious fraud, Joshua Clunk.

Balmer, Edwin and MacHarg, William. The Achievements of Luther
Trant (1910) was submitted with warm insistence by Lillian de la
Torre and Vincent Starrett. Their historical interest is unquestion-
able but, unquestionably, the stories have faded with the years.

Seeding, Francis, pseud. (Palmer, John Leslie and Saunders, Hilary
St. George) is best known for a series of pretty footling tales of in-
trigue; but he is author as well of a few detective novels, one of
which. Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) is in the considered opinion
of Vincent Starrett, *'one of the ten greatest detective novels."

Bell, Josephine, Murder in Hospital (1937) or From Natural Causes
(1939) two among^ several fine novels by a writer still not published
in this country.

Bellairs, George. Death of a Busybody (1943) by a humorously ob-
servant new English writer.

Bennett, Arnold. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902). An extravaganza,
‘‘borderline detection but an interesting specimen,” says Starrett.

Bentley, E. C. Trent's Lcut Case (1913) to which Boucher and Starrett
would add Bentley's short stories, Trent Intervenes (1938),

Berkeley, Anthony, pseud. (Cox, Anthony Berkeley). The Poisoned
Chocolates Case (1929) characteristically dry and acrid, and Trial and
Error (1937) with its unexpected sympathy,

Biggers, Earl Derr. The Chinese Parrot (1926). Detective: Charlie Chan.

Blake, Nicholas, pseud. (Day Lewis, Cecil). The Beast Must Die (1938),

Readers' Guide to Crime 499

Boucher, Anthony, pseud. (White, William A.P.) The Case of the Seven
of Calvary (1937) unusually good first novel with a university set-
ting, or The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940) a cheerful
Sherlockian frolic.

Boutell, Anita. Death Has a Past (1939).

Bowers, Dorothy. Fear and Miss Betony (1942).

Bramah, Ernest, pseud. (Smith, Ernest Bramah). Max Carr ados (Lon-
don, 1914) or The Eyes of Max Carrados (1924). Carrados has been
followed by many blind detectives but none is his equal.

Brahms, Caryl, pseud. (Abrahams, Doris Caroline) and Simon, A. J.
A Bullet in the Ballet (1938) a burlesque for balletomanes.

Branson, H. C. The Pricking Thumb (1943) or The Case of the Giant
Killer (1944) both quietly skilful.

Brock, Lynn, pseud. (McAllister, Alister). The Kink (1927) or The Stoat
(London, 1940) both long, sedate, intricate, and absorbing.

Buchan, John. The Steps (1915) primarily a tale of pursuit but with
a tidy mystery.

Cannan, Joanna. Death at “The Do^* (1941)*

Carpenter, Margaret. Experiment Perilous (1943).

Carr, John Dickson. The Burning Court (1937) although Ellery Queen
objects that it is *‘not really in the genre” and Anthony Boucher sets
it among “borderline” novels. The Three Coffins (1935) is the most
learned of Carr’s many “locked room” puzzles expounded by Dr.
Gideon Fell. Lillian de la Torre argues warmly for The Murder of
Sir Edmund Godfrey (1936) Carr’s brilliant and careful treatment of
a great English case.

Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep (1939) and The High Window
(1942) respectively in and beyond the Hammett tradition.

Chesterton, G. K. The Father Brown Omnibus (1945) gathers all of the
stories about that engaging and penetrating priest

Cheyney, Peter. Dark Duet (1943) is the first and much the best of an
increasingly trying series of counter-espionage tales.

Christie, Agatha, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) probably the
most disputed of detective stories for its startling use of a famous
clich^; The ABC Murders (1936), Murder in Retrospect (1942). The
critics agree pretty generally on all but the last although a good many
others by Mrs. Christie were suggested as well. Several critics spoke
restively of Poirot's too familiar “little grey cells."

Clason, Clyde B. The Man from Tibet (1938). This and other cases of
Theocritus Lucius Westborough are noted with surprisingly frequent
approval.

500 James Sandoe

Clements, E. H. Perhaps a Little Danger (1942). Miss Haines observes
that “this may not be strictly within the canon, but it is admissible
and delightful/*

Cole, G. D. H. and Margaret. Death in the Quarry (1934) is certainly
one of the best among the Coles' many and very unequal novels.

Coles, Manning, pseud. (Manning, Adelaide and Coles, Cyril). Drink
to Yesterday and A Toast to Tomorrow (1941) both spy stories, the
first in a fairly grim, realistic tone; the second, its sequel, in more
characteristic and conventional vein.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone (i868). In his introduction to the
World’s Classics (Oxford University Press) edition of this, T. S. Eliot
calls it, more strikingly than accurately, “the first, the longest, and
the best of modern English detective novels”; the warmth informing
his judgment will be contested by few.

Connington, J. J. pseud. (Stewart, Alfred Walter). The Sweepstake
Murders (1932) one among many, all meticulous, scrupulous, un-
spectacular, sound.

Cores, Lucy. Painted for the Kill (1943), a sound and witty first
novel.

Crofts, Freeman Wills. The Cask ( 1920 ) and Wilful and Premeditated
( 1934 ). The first is an excellent sample of Crofts’ painstaking “time-
table” tales whose climax is the meticulous destruction of a false
alibi; the latter is a sound example of the “inverted” detective story
which recounts the flowering of a crime before it concerns itself with
detection.

Cunningham, A. B. The Strange Death of Manny Square (1941) is one
of a sound series of tales observantly and compassionately set in the
southern hill country.

Daly, Elizabeth. Murders in Volume 2 (1941) or Arrow Pointing No-
where (1944) quietly brilliant, reserved and ingenious.

De la Torre, Lillian, pseud. (McCue, Lillian de la Torre Bueno). Eliza-
beth Is Missing (1943) reconstruction of an 18th century mystery by
the author of a series of engaging Boswellian detective pastiches.

Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) ed. by Vincent
Starrett (1941). Starrett’s is the first scholarly edition of the text of
Dickens’ unfinished novel; its introduction is a fine summary of the
various theories about its proper conclusion.

Dickson, Carter, pseud. (Carr, John Dickson). The Red Widow Mur-
ders (1935) and The Judas Window (1938) “locked room” puzzles un-
locked ebulliently by Sir Henry Merrivale.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes (1936) to

Readers* Guide to Crime 501

which may be added with profit The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
(1933) by Vincent Starrett and, as guide to the intricate conjectures
of Holmesians, Baker Street Inventory: A Sherlockian Bibliography
(1945) compiled by Edgar W. Smith and supplemented quarterly in
the new Baker Street Journal,

Duke, Winifred. Skin for Skin (1935) based on the murder of Julia Wal-
lace.

Eberhart, Mignon G. Fair Warning (1936). Several critics, sharing
Ogden Nash’s dislike for the “Had-I-But-Known” school of feminine
hysterics, argue for Mrs. Eberhart’s omission; others point rather to
her earlier tales — especially The Patient in Room 18 — starring Nurse
Keate.

Fair, A. A., pseud. (Gardner, Erie Stanley). The Bigger They Come
(1939) first and funniest in a lusty series.

Falkner, John Meade. The Nebuly Coat (London, 1903) anticipates
many of the qualities of Russell Thorndike’s The Slype (1927) and
both of these cathedral tales deserve wider acquaintance.

Fletcher, J. S. The Middle Temple Murder (1918) is, I think, listed
from habit rather than merit. Fletcher’s later novels are pretty gen-
erally condemned, but Miss Haines is one of the advocates of the
“early stories, about 1915 to 1925.”

Ford, Leslie, pseud. (Brown, Zenith). The Simple Way of Poison (1937)
whose romantic heroine, Grace Latham, has been the target of some
irritated comment.

Freeman, R. Austin, Dr. Thorndyke*s Omnibus (1932) collected the five
volumes of short stories published in this country, most notably the
“inverted” tales in The Singing Bone (1912), and Dr. Thorndyke*s
Crime File containing a biographical introduction. Freeman’s essay
on “The Art of the Detective Story,” “5A King’s Bench Walk,” an
essay by the editor, P. M. Stone, and three novels: The Eye of Osiris
(1911); The Mystery of Angelina Frood' (1^2^ which is, incidentally,

- an answer to certain solutions of Dickens' novel; and Mr. Potter-
mack* s Oversight (1930) an “inverted” tale.

Frome, David, pseud. (Brown, Zenith). The Man from Scotland Yard
(1932) one of several novels about Mr. Pinkerton which are noted
with pleasure.

Forester, C. S. Payment Deferred (1926) a lean story of murder with a
finale as malicious as Francis lies’ for Malice Aforethought (1931).

Fuller, Timothy. Reunion with Murder (1941).

Gaboriau, Emile. Monsieur Lecoq (1869) and U Affaire Lerouge (1866)
although Ellery Queen, bowing to the historical importance of the

502 James Sandoe

tales, points out that they are "tough reading in these streamlined
days.”

Gardner, Erie Stanley. The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935). Gard-
ner’s tales are nearly equal although recently Perry Mason has be-
come appallingly sententious.

Gilbert, Anthony, pseud. (Malleson, Lucy Beatrice). Mystery in the
Woodshed (1942) although it shows too little o£ ripe Mr. Crook.
Green, Anna Katharine. The Leavenworth Case (1878). Ellery Queen
suggests omission, waiving "historical value in favor of readability.”
The historical importance of the novel is argued in S. S. Van Bine’s
introduction to the edition of 1934.

Greene, Graham. The Confidential Agent (1939) one of several sorrow-
fully savage "entertainments” by a fine novelist.

Greene, Ward. Death in the Deep South (1936) a novel based on the
Leo Frank case of 1915.

Grey, A, F., pseud. (Neal, Adeline Phyllis). Momentary Stoppage (Lon-
don, 1942). A delicately humorous tale set richly in a Paris pension,
Gruber, Frank. Considerable disagreement as to whether Gruber ought
to be admitted. His French Key (1939) was twice proposed. Anthony
Boucher preferred his pseudonymous Last Doorbell (1941) by "John
K. Vedder.”

Hammett, Dashiell. The Complete Dashiell Hammett (1942) con-
tains his five novels but should be supplemented by the curious re-
trieved "pulp” novelette, Blood Money (1943) and Ellery Queen’s
three collections of Hammett’s short stories: The Adventures of Sam
Spade (1944); The Continental Op (1945); and The Return of the
Continental Op (1945).

Hare, Cyril, pseud. (Clark, Alfred Alexander Gordon). Tragedy at Law

(1943)-

Hart, Frances Noyes. The Bellamy Trial (1927), reported in the court-
room.

Head, Matthew, pseud. (Canaday, John). The Smell of Money (1943)
a fresh and immediate first novel.

Heard, H. F. (otherwise Gerald Heard), A Taste for Honey (1941)
widely praised as a tale for connoisseurs.

Heyer, Georgette. Envious Casca (1941).

Hilton, James. Was it Murder? was published first as Murder at School
(1933) “Glen Trevor,” Starrett calls it "unusual, very well writ-
ten ... a fint rate story.” Hilton’s own opinion of it is low.
Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay. Lady Killer (1942) or The Obstinate Mur-
derer (1938),

Readers* Guide to Crime 503

Holmes, H. H. pseud. (White, William A. P.) Rocket to the Mor^e
(1942) sound ‘locked room*' puzzling set down among the interesting
tribe of “scientifiction” writers.

Homes, Geoffrey, pseud. (Mainwaring, Daniel). The Doctor Died at
Dusk (1956).

Hornung, E. W. A Thief in the Night (1905). Rogue stories about Raf-
fles, the amateur cracksman; a necessary obverse of the detective story.

Household, Geoffrey. Rogue Male (1959) an absorbing and skilful story
of pursuer and pursued. Deems Taylor marks it among the most
memorable.

Hughes, Dorothy B. The Fallen Sparrow (1942) or The Delicate Ape
(1944) tales of espionage and terror.

Hull, Richard, pseud. (Sampson, Richard Henry). The Murder of My
Aunt (1935) a brilliantly unpleasant “inverted’* tale.

Huxley, Elspeth. Murder at Government House (1937) t)etter than the
better known Murder on Safari (1938).

lies, Francis, pseud. (Cox, Anthony Berkeley). Before the Fact (1932)
filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Suspicion (1941) with a softened (read-
ers said soft-headed) finale.

Innes, Michael, pseud. (Stewart, John Innes Mackintosh). Lament for
a Maker (1938) or Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) ingenious and erudite.

Jarrett, Cora. Night over Fitch* s Pond (1933) a “borderline” novel.

Jepson, Selwyn. Keep Murder Quiet (1941).

Johns, Veronica Parker. The Singing Widow (1941). Anthony Boucher
proposes this with surprising warmth, observing that it “has a plot
of such strongly intertwined horror that Tourneur would have leaped
at the chance to write it.”

Johnson, W. Bolingbroke, pseud. (Bishop, Morris). The Widening
Stain (1942) was written with arched eyebrows and of a university
library.

Keene, Faraday, pseud. Pattern in Black and Red (1934).

King, Rufus. Valcour Meets Murder (1932) or the improvisation, Profile
of a Murder (1935).

Knox, Ronald A. The Viaduct Murder (1926) dry and satirically in-
genious.

Latimer, Jonathan. The Lady in the Morgue (1936). Sample of the
rye-soaked, zany-cum-sex school.

Lawrence, Hilda. A Time to Die (1945) delicately incisive.

Leblanc, Maurice. Les Huit Coups de VHorloge (Paris, ca.1922) trans-
lated m The Eight Strokes of the Clock (1922) a series of connected
short stories presenting Axstne Lupin, “gentleman-cambrioleur,” in

504 James Sandoe

the character of detective. But Ellery Queen insists that the novels
about Lupin are too little read and recommends, in order, (1910),
The Crystal Stopper (Le Bouchon de Cristal, 1912), and The Teeth
of the Tiger {Les Dents du Tigre, 1914).

Lee, Gypsy Rose. The G String Murders (1941) arouses wild dissension
among the critics, half of them damning it out of hand, half defend-
ing it for its richly reeking background.

Lees, Hannah, pseud, (and Bachmann, Lawrence). Death in the DolVs
House (1943).

Leroux, Gaston. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908). Craig Rice
writes: **I would have no doubts regarding the inclusion of Leroux.
The Mystery of the Yellow Room . , . witfi ail its faults, remains
the most fascinating locked-room puzzle of all time.*' Some readers
will regard this as too generous a tribute.

Lockridge, Frances and Richard. Murder out of Turn (1941) second of
the adventures of Mr. and Mrs. North,

Lorac, E. G. R., pseud. (Rivett, Edith Caroline). Death of an Author
(1937) is only one of many warmingly competent tales.

Lowndes, Marie (Belloc). The Lodger (1913) but three diverse critics
damn this as ‘Vastly overrated.”

McCloy, Helen. Cue for Murder (1942) excellent puzzling, or The
Goblin Market (1943) a thriller presenting Dr. Basil Willing pseudo-
nymously.

MacDonald, Philip. Warrant for X (1938) far better than Anthony
Gethryn's first, cluttered, unfair and usually cited case. The Rasp

(1924)-

McGuire, Paul. A Funeral in Eden (1938) or Enter Three Witches (1940)
both brilliant, mordant and sensitive.

Marsh, Ngaio. Overture to Death (1939) or Death in a White Tie (1938).
Most critics added Colour Scheme (1943) despite its almost incidental
interest in crime or detection.

Mason, A. E. W. The House of the Arrow (1924) and/or At the Villa
Rose (1910). Commentators disagree violently as to which is good,
but all agree that one of them is great.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Ashenden: or, The British Agent (1924) six
unconventionally realistic tales of espionage. All are contained in the
omnibus East and West (1934).

Milne, A. A. The Red House Mystery (1922) appears on lists rather
habitually; its refreshment is largely dissipated and its artifices more
trying with time,

Mitchell, Gladys. When Last I Died (1942) is fine, slowly cumulative in

Readers' Guide to Crime

505

effect and rewarding. It is also, mysteriously, the only one of Miss
Mitchell's many novels to have been published in this country for a
good many years. Alternates: Laurels Are Poison (London, 1942),
Sunset over Soho (London, 1943), The Rising of the Moon (London,

1945)-

Morrison, Arthur. Martin Hewitt: Investigator (1894). Of the short sto-
ries of Jacques Futrelle, a fairly typical contemporary, only The Prob-
lem of Cell (1907) retains much of its original novelty; but Morri-
son’s less striking short stories have stood the passage of time well.

Offord, Lenore Glen. Skeleton Key (1943) a refreshingly intelligent and
humorous variant of the HIBK-school, or Mrs. Offord’s quieter,
richer Glass Mask (1944).

Oppenheim, E. Philips, Several critics insisted that The Great Imper-
sonation (1920) must be admitted if Eric Ambler’s tales were. A
re-reading of the Oppenheim extravaganza leaves their insistence
mysterious.

Page, Marco, pseud. (Kurnitz, Harry). Fast Company (1938).

Palmer, Stuart. The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla (1937). A case for
Hildegarde Withers.

Patrick, Q., pseud. (Webb, Richard Wilson). The Grindle Nightmare
(1935) is among the ‘‘twelve best detective stories” in Anthony Bou-
cher’s estimation. Ralph Partridge (Raymond Postgate?), writing in
the New Statesman and Nation prefers S,S. Murder (1933). Q. Patrick
is a pseudonym used first by Mr. Webb and Martha Mott Kelley, then
by Mr. Webb alone, and at present by him and Hugh Callingham
Wheeler, (They also write as “Patrick Quentin” and “Jonathan
Stagge.”) Both of the novels cited appear to be solo performances by
the constant Mr. Webb.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) the first
detective story; “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842); and “The Pur-
loined Letter” (1844) with the two contested tales, “The Gold Bug”
(1843) ‘‘Thou Art the Man” (1844) are reprinted in Monsieur
Dupin (1904). The last tale is curiously absent from the otherwise
sound edition of Poe's short stories edited by Killis Campbell (1927).

Post, Melville Davisson, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason
(1896) axe “dated” but significant; more memorable are the fine tales
about Uncle Abner (1918).

Postgate, Raymond, Verdict of Twelve (1940) or Somebody at the Door

(1943)-

Queen, Ellery, pseud. The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) or “Barnaby
Ross's” Tragedy of X as samples of Queen’s puzzling at its most in-

5 o6 James Sandoe

genious, with the still surprising Calamity Town (194^) for its sub-
stance and texture as well as its puzzle.

Rawson, Clayton. Death from a Top Hat (1938) first and most striking
of the Merlini novels.

Rhode, John, pseud. The consensus finds Rhode dull but two critics
present a minority report for his Murders in Praed Street (1928).

Rice, Craig. Trial by Fury (1941) or Home Sweet Homicide (1944).

Rinehart, Mary Roberts. The Door (1930) is one of a distinguished
series, but two critics argue convincingly for her first book. The Circu-
lar Staircase (1908). Mrs. Rinehart founded the HIBK-school.

Sale, Richard. Lazarus (1942) is a competent sample of the sensation
and sex school although he may be surpassed by James Hadley Chase
{No Orchids for Miss Blandish, tough stuff at its nadir).

Sayers, Dorothy L. Here ensues wild disorder, no two critics agreeing
which of her fine novels shall be preferred. The innocent intrusion of
Harriet Vane into the life of Lord Peter Wimsey (in Strong Poison)
and her extensive self-probings before she marries him, make many
readers howl with rage. The latest of Miss Sayers' novels. Busman's
Honeymoon (1937) is significantly absent from all lists. In spite of
their protests against Miss Vane, Strong Poison (1930) is listed oftenest
and after it The Nine Tailors (1934) and Have His Carcase (1932)
second of the novels involving the Vane. The only solution would ap-
pear to be purchase of all of the novels. The epistolary Documents
in the Case (1930) written in collaboration with “Robert Eustace"
(Eustace Barton) is admirable in itself and unique for Lord Peter's
absence, and Gaudy Night (1936) notable to the university book buyer
for its academic background.

Seeley, Mabel. The Listening House (1938) is a terrifying reply to those
who object to the HIBK-school.

Shearing, Joseph, pseud. (Long, Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell).
Blanche Fury (1939) in the estimation of Dr. Margery Bailey of Stan-
ford University, *'is nearly worthy to rank with Wuthering Heights,"
and The Crime of Laura Sarelle (1941) a sound second.

Simenon, Georgts. Maigret Keeps a Rendezvous (1941) contains The
Sailors' Rendezvous (Au Rendez-vous des Terre-Neuvas) and The
Saint-Fiacre Affair (U Affaire Saint-Fiacre); Maigret to the Rescue
(1941) contains The Flemish Shop (Chez les Flammands) and The
Guinguette by the Seine (La Guinguette d Deux Sous). Maigret’s
audience is relatively small but intensely and compellingly vocal.
Readers used to more conventional detective stories are advised to
read something about the author before reading the novelettes. See,

Readers' Guide to Crime 5^7

for instance, John Peale Bishop’s “Georges Simenon” in The New
Republic^ March lo, 1941 or Raymond Mortimer’s “Simenon” in
The New Statesman and Nation^ March 10, 1942.

Starrett, Vincent Midnight and Percy Jones (1936).

Steel, Kurt, pseud. (Kagey, Rudolf). Judas, Incorporated (1939) one of
a number of generally sound tales about Hank Heyer, private in-
vestigator.

Steeves, Harrison. Good Night, Sheriff (1941).

Stevenson, Robert Louis and Osbourne, Lloyd. The Wrecker (1891) was
designed as a roman policier by its authors but has generally been
denied admittance to the genre by critics. Here submitted for recon-
sideration as a splendid piece of storytelling, soundly mysterious.

Stout, Rex. The Red Box (1937), Too Many Cooks (1938). Nearly all of
Archie Goodwin’s accounts of Nero Wolfe's cases are suggested.

Strange, John Stephen, pseud. (Tillett, Dorothy Stockbridge). Look
Your Last (1943).

Stribling, T. S. Clues of the Caribbees (1929) short stories, curiously lit-
tle known.

Talbot, Hake, pseud. (Nelms, Henning). Rim of the Pit (1944) the sec-
ond novel by a newcomer in the demanding tradition of Melville
Davisson Post and John Dickson Carr.

Upheld, Arthur W. Murder Down Under (1943; published in Australia,
1937, as Mr. Jelly's Business) is slow-moving but meticulous and richly
set.

Vandercook, John W. Murder in Trinidad (1933).

Van Dine, S, S., pseud. (Wright, Willard Huntington). The Bishop
Murder Case (1929) is oftenest preferred although there is much sym-
pathy with Ogden Nash’s insistence that “Philo Vance needs a kick
in the pance’’ for his abominably obtrusive erudition.

White, Ethel Lina. The Wheel Spins (1936) is a happy exception among
the tryingly inefficient tales of terror by Miss White. It was adapted
by Alfred Hitchcock as The Lady Vanishes (1938).

Whitheld, Raoul. Death in a Bowl (1931). Whitheld is an unjustly for-
gotten contemporary of Dashiell Hammett.

Wilde, Percival. Inquest (1940).

Wilson, Mitchell. Footsteps Behind Her (1941) an excellently sustained
chase if, like most tales of pursuit, Eurydicean in retrospect.

Woolrich, Cornell. The Bride Wore Black (1940) or, under his pseudo-
nym of William Irish, Phantom Lady (1942) tales of rushing terror.

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 o’o 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (To

WATCHMAN, WHAT OF THE
NIGHT?

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ooobooo'b 000000000 oool) 0 0 0 oobooooooooooooo

The Passing of the Detective in Literature

J)0000000000000 0 QJ) 0 0 0 0 Oi? 0 0 0 (tp ao 0 0 0 0 Oi^ 0 00 0 0J> ttPJJ 0 0 0 Opp 0

The detective in literature is hardly more than fifty years old,
but already he is passing into decay. He has enjoyed extraordinary
popularity, and may even claim to be the only person equally be-
loved by statesmen and by errand boys. His old achievements en-
thral as ever. But he makes no new conquests. So far as he survives
at all, he has been compelled to curb his energies within the com-
pass of the magazines, and instead of contending forces marshalled
in regular order on the board, presents now the bare problem:
“White to play, and mate in three moves.*’

It is curious to note the shifts to which the novelist has been put
in the attempt to clothe his detective with a garment of disinterest-
edness. And the reason lies on tl^e surface. Arrange the persons of
the drama as you will, the detective will always emerge as the hero.
The crime is comparatively a small detail, and, so it be not too re-
volting in character, almost any infringement of the law will do.
The criminal cannot ordinarily attract much sympathy or play a
very large part.

Thus it will be seen that the detective has to be a personage of
peculiar type. He must be ofiScially deputed to detect this particular
crime^ yet romance demands that he shall not work merely for
money. Standing outside the police force and usually hostile to it,
he must be able to command its services for investigations beneath
his dignity. If an amateur, he must bear no antagonism to the crim-
inal, yet his connection with the ajffair must be suflBciently close to
lend him authority to act. Above all, if he is to command interest,
it is essential that he should possess the “flair,” the subtle sense
which reveals to him the trend of little indications. Unless his pos-
session of this sense be emphasised, the deductive method will ap-
pear arbitrary guesswork, and it is on this rock that many modern
attempts at mystery-weaving go to pieces. For the weak point of

511

512 The Passing of the Detective in Literature

the deductive system is that every indication found is capable of
bearing a dozen different interpretations. The ideal detective of
romance pieces details together as a thought-reader divines things
from the pressure of a hand. He detects not by virtue of simple
powers of observation, but by a trained intuition amounting almost
to second sight. It is this which lent him his grand air and brought
him to greatness. It is this which is working his decay.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the prestige of the detective
should fade in proportion as the business of detecting crime as-
sumed a more specialised character. For alasi modern scientific
methods have overtaken him, and he has fallen hopelessly behind
the times. He who was accustomed to issue terse commands to mud-
dled members of the force is now ignorant of the very A B C of
criminal investigation. He who smiled at professional ignorance
must now bear to find his own amateur little ways the scorn of
amused experts. It is hard, for he certainly led the way in creating
the modem detective force before whose unerring eyes the secrets
of sinful Europe lie unfolded. At the epoch when he came into
being, no efficient police existed. In France, the highest quality
aimed at was the kind of blood-hound tenacity of identification
illustrated in Les Miserables, In England, there was the good-
natured shrewdness of Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, but there
was no science of investigation, no regular course of training, no
system. And the detective of fiction easily triumphed. He tri-
umphed in France more decisively on account of the astounding
manoeuvres permitted to the Juge d’Instmction under the French
law. But he did very well in England, even under the more sports-
manlike system of judge and jury which he was bound to respect.

And it is modem education, the relentless adaptation of means
to an end, which has prepared his downfall. The regular force has
taken its revenge, and the lordly person who used to throw them his
secrets, at whose feet they sat in awe, is beaten by the very weapons
he first taught them to use.

From henceforth he retires to limbo with the dodo and the Dis-
trict Railway’s trains. He carries with him the regret of a civilised
world.

The foregoing selection appeared in the Academy {London) foi
December 50, j_po5.

A Sober Word on the Detective Story
By Harrison R. Steeves

0 0000 0 0 000 0 0 000000000 0 0 0 (Toooooocfooobooooooooobo dinnr^

With his literate j sensitive novel Good Night, Sheriff Harrison R.
Steeves made a single but important contribution to detective fic-
tion. Published in 1^41, the book has been frequently named on
lists of ''best*' police stories compiled since that date. He also made
a single, thoughtful contribution to the critical literature of the
subject in the present essay, which appeared in Harper’s Magazine
for April 1941- For many years a professor of English at Columbia
University, Mr. Steeves carries on the tradition of the men and
women of academic distinction on both sides of the water who
have interested themselves purposefully in the genre.

There is both room and need in detective story criticism for the
kind of trained dissection and diagnosis Mr. Steeves performs in
the present essay; and he puts his finger accurately if painfully on
many of the ills the modern police novel is heir to. Much of what
he says cannot, and should not, be shrugged off. Yet the judicious
reader, encountering the pessimism of his final paragraphs may
wish to recall that similar and no 4 ess-logical prophecies of doom
have been uttered for — as we have seen in the preceding selection
— a good forty years and possibly longer.

5 L 0 0 b 0 0 0 0 p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Q fi 0 0 0 Q 0 0 0 0 p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

I READ detective stories. I read them and I enjoy a good one. I can
tolerate a mediocre one. I am strong-minded enough to put down
— or to throw down — a poor one; and there are countless such. And
I have read enough of them to wonder why they interest me; for I
have little actual respect for the art. I cheerfully concede that I
peruse ten quite worthless books for every reasonably good one;
and at that I try to pick my writers. At least I keep a black-list of
the duds. It saves time and expense.

Harrison R. Steeves

For riin-otthe-mill readers this confession of corrupt taste might
be an innocent one, or at least an excusable one. But I am an ac-
credited apostle of culture; for I am a college professor, and a pro-
fessor of literature at that. That’s quite another thing, isn’t it?

Or is it? So far as I know, my occasional wallow has never afiEected
my interest in or my judgment of “respectable” literature. “Lear,”
“Lycidas,” The Portrait of a Lady, Growth of the Soil — all these
work the same powerful magic as ever — in spite of my having dis-
cussed them for years with undergraduates. No, I think I’ye not
been soiled, nor my intelligence reproached. And for the waste of
hours in a confessedly idle pursuit, of course some hours were meant
to be wasted. I’m neither sorry nor humble about it; nor am I
proud.

I am intellectually interested, however, in my tolerance; and I
should like to account for it in some reasonable way, and with a
less glib explanation than “escape,” which explains nothing. In the
first place, escape must be from a stupid or depressing scheme of
life into an imagined world more roomy or more roseate. But the
professorial job is for me neither stupid nor depressing. I like an
occasional change from it, to be sure, but I can get that in many and
various ways. In the second place, escape must be, or should be, to
desirable latitudes in the world of fency; and the doings and inter-
ests of detectives, amateur or professional, would be my last notion
of an agreeable way of life. If I actually sought escape on one of
the lower planes of literary interest, I ought to be attracted by
the “Westerns”; for as a scene the West is for me (an anchored
Easterner) a breathless emotional glory. But a story set in that scene
I find invariably as arid as its physical background.

No, escape has little to do with the matter. I cheerfully admit
the “escape” motive in the crotchet that divides my interest with
the detective story — ^books on strange and out-of-the-way corners of
the world. Tibet, Greenland, the Australian wilds, desert China,
the reaches of the Amazon — ^they and their denizens perennially
fascinate me, and I know why. It is because they are the farthest
extreme from the seemingly tame and ordered life that civilization
has wished upon me. But the detective story doesn’t interest me in
that way at all. I have no feeling whatever toward detectives as a
class; it takes an extremely good crime (not necessarily a sensational

A Sober Word on the Detective Story 515

one) to draw me beyond the column-head o£ the daily paper; and I
have only an academic interest in the genesis and psychology of the
inordinate social aggressions.

I can tell you the state of mind in which I read detective stories,
but I am not sure that that answers the question why I read them.
They seem an unforgivable waste of time when my mental energy
is high. When it hangs in a loose loop they can interest me. After
dinner, at the end of two or three days of scarcely remitted work,
when conversation is an effort and company a tax, they have their
use. They go well in an armchair, with tobacco sufficient, and
preferably with one’s feet well elevated. Of course the final fifty
pages should be read in pajamas. They are the best preparative in
the world (except perhaps the story portions of the Bible) for
thoughtless, unburdened sleep. For me, then, detective stories are a
narcotic, mildly stimulative, to be taken as a rule when productive
energy is low and discrimination more or less deliberately put aside.
I can read them also in vacation intervals when idleness is virtue.

But if the mood in which I can read them is one of conditioned
irresponsibility, I must nevertheless, as a “professional” reader, so
to speak, allow my critical judgment and my self-respect their day
in court. I am not sure, however, that defense is necessary for read-
ers who have no reputation at stake and who take their detective
yams without qualms. And I am seriously interested in what de-
tective stories give them.

When I speak of detective stories, of course I mean detective
stories; not melodramatic crime stories nor clap-trap mysteries nor
international spy stories with the thin thread of a sinister plot run-
ning uncertainly through them; nor miracle stories, not even when
the miracle can be substantiated in the pharmacopoeia or the pur-
lieus of the criminal courts. I mean stories in which a respectable
problem of identity is presented to a respectable intelligence with,
by preference, of course a modicum of literary intelligence in the
writing and, if one is lucky, even a touch of literary grace above the
mere needful trickery of the performance. Such stories have had
good readers. We are told that bishops and Supreme Court justices
have shared the weakness for them. That doesn’t sanctify the weak-
ness or give it more than a fictitious dignity, but it helps to make it
critically intelligible.

Harrison R. SteeveS

516

Curiously enough, the taste for detective fiction (like that foi
chess and for great claret) seems to be all but exclusively masculine.
To the best of my memory I have never met a woman who turned
to it recurrently for sensation, escape, solace, amusement, or drug.
Apparently there is something in the type that is foreign to women’s
minds or to their sympathies. Or perhaps their common sense re-
volts from its transparencies. Yet women are great readers of fiction,
and possibly by mental constitution better readers of the novel
than men. And women probably digest much of their usable phi-
losophy in the very assimilable form of fiction; for a deserving novel
demands some thought upon aspects of conduct and social respon-
sibility that are not centered in one’s own experience.

But fiction for women seems to require a distinct and significant
animating idea. That is true, I think, even on the lower levels of
wishful romanticism. There may lie the reason why the run of men
— I don’t of necessity mean cultivated readers — ^have to have their
own kind of fiction — ^not that they are too busy or too tired to do
“serious” reading, but that action, physical or mental, presented to
them in relatively simple and static terms, has more appeal than
subtler questions of ways of living presented through serious though
fictitious cases. Men read the detective story largely for the reason
that it does not have to be taken seriously. Probably women de-
cline it for exactly the same reason.

Yet women write them! That doesn’t alter the fact that (within
the area of my own knowledge) women don’t as a rule read them.
And if there is any explanation to be made of their writing them,
and sometimes writing them extremely well, I am inclined to put
it down to the simple fact that in any kind of good-humored trick-
ery any clever and thoroughly intent woman can put it over any
man, any time.

The absence of seriousness in the detective story is apparent first
of all in the nonchalance, or even the sardonic humor, of the atti-
tude it takes toward crime, and in its habitual compromise with
retributive justice through the hundred and one expedients which
will save from the gallows the perpetrator of an offense which has

A Sober Word on the Detective Story 517

any colorable sanction. This indifference to moral intention, how-
ever, seems to me a small matter. A literary divertissement can, as
Lamb pointed out, dispense with moral consistency.

There is a sense, however, in which detective fiction is more
culpably unserious; and that is in its almost unvarying failure to
evoke the emotional atmosphere of the situation that surrounds a
considered crime from the birth of motive to the last heavy mo-
ments of expiation. And that failure is noteworthy because it is
artistic failure. Of course the rules of the form prescribe that the
animus of the detective’s search be intellectual, not moral and not
sentimental; yet the fact remains that most of these stories seem
to flourish in an emotional vacuum, and that fact would seem at
the very outset to come perilously close to barring them from the
realm of art.

But why, you ask, do we need to drag art into the discussion of
an essentially artless form? That question itself begs another ques-
tion. Is detective fiction necessarily artless? My guess is that the early
writers of it — Brockden Brown, Poe, Wilkie Collins — did not be-
lieve so, for their stories have emotive force. And the embroidery
that has been expended upon recent stories of the type at least
shows a sense of this insufficiency, though with less happy because
less integral effects. The widely expressed contempt for the type
is not altogether ‘*high-hat.” It must come from knowing readers
who expect a few of the vitamins which good art should afford. And
once in a while, once in a long, long while, the detective story pro-
vides them. There are, I insist, a few actually classic detective
stories — at least a dozen or a score. They are not artless. Still more
importantly, they are not inartistic; and an inartistic work is simply
one which fails to realize the proved potentialities of its form.

Possibly it is a corollary to the last remark that a work of art
must accept also the limitations of its form — if that form is clearly
defined. We don’t look for Matthew Arnold’s “high seriousness” in
the Ingoldsby Legends; nor can we normally expect great revela-
tion witliin the prescribed confines of the genre we are considering.
Yet the mystery tale can be good art, at least in those respects which
are elemental for any work of fiction. We should be allowed to
breathe the real air of real places, feel the charm or the pressure
of a distinct local life, hear the stir and play of agreeable con-

Harrison R. Sleeves

518

versation, and savor the everyday emotions. Above all, we can ask
that the story be inhabited by convincing human beings, doing
things that human beings do. Indeed I know of no first-class de-
tective story in which the exigencies of a special complication are
not managed with all-round literary competency — and with the
air of social truth.

So far as the detective story is deficient in these clear require-
ments of good art it is deficient in fundamentals. And that de-
ficiency in organic or ‘‘functionaF’ art is intensified for the good
reader's consciousness by an increasingly disturbing use of every
sort of irrelevant and trivial appliqu^ art — glitter, gratuitous flip-
pancy, meaningless wit, and conventional beautification. This is
no depreciation of decorative purpose, but merely a reminder that
art must be in a work, and not on it. Much, needless to say, of this
aesthetic frivolity must be blamed upon commercialism. In a “sell-
ers' market/' the economists tell us, the goods produced are likely
to cheapen. Even the author of The Middle Temple Murder and
the authoress of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd have at times fallen
victims to their own industry.

I doubt that the particular principles of this art, however, arc as
tightly formulated as some of its sponsors would have us believe. I
have in mind at least three pronouncements — ex cathedra — ^which
tell us what a detective story can and cannot be. And I have seen
almost all these principles profitably ignored. In E. C. Bentley's
Trent* s Last Case three points of the law are violated: the de-
tective is defeated in his inquiry (which we are told should never
be); the effective clues to the criminal are not plainly planted, or
rather not at all (and that, it is said, is sheer dishonesty); and there
is no readable motive for the crime, though there is a triumphantly
res^onable explanation — ^after the fact. But in spite of these pre-
sumed irregularities (and despite the fact that the story belongs to
the past generation) I have never followed a plot with more urgent
interest, and never been more utterly delighted with the brisk travel
of incident, with the clear picture of a credible society, and with
the deftness and the logic of the conclusion. That is as it should
be: the critics cannot tell the writers the rules of the game, for all
rules in art (as the best critics themselves have told us) were made
to be broken. And in a form so wholly dependent as the detective

A Sober Word on the Detective Story 519

story upon ingenuity and surprise the bout between the writer and
the reader must be catch-as-catch-can.

It is still a step or two to the determination of what goes to the
making of a good detective story. I am convinced, however, that it
is all but impossible to offer any confident judgment upon that
question; for while baseball-fans and Dadaists and Muggletonians
have firm collective convictions, the detective-story readers are not
only many but formidably varied. All discussion of preferences is
ultimately reduced to the question of what one likes because he
looks for it, and there are many types within the type, as well as
authors, to choose from. So any statement of preferences that I
can offer must be invidious. I might add to the three or four works
that I have mentioned in passing, Anthony Berkeley's Trial and
Error y Margery Allingham's Flowers for the Judge, Percival Wilde's
Inquest, Frances Noyes Hart's Hide in the Dark, Dorothy Sayers*
Nine Tailors, and perhaps — ^with a conscious bow to tradition —
Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four. I have named books, not authors,
for I have read some pretty unsatisfactory stories by most of these
writers. And my omission of Dashiell Hammett, S. S. Van Dine,
H. C. Bailey, Michael Innes, and a dozen others has no particular
point, because I simply refuse to stand behind my preferences as
a selection of the “ten best." They are not; they are stories that I
like, and I know why I like them. The most erudite fan I know
refuses to share all these likings and rates highly things that I have
thought stupid or affected or weakly put together.

All of the stories I have mentioned except Doyle's, and — yes^ —
Fletcher's Middle Temple Murder, are definitely more than well-
made detective yarns. There is some breath of humanity, some
charm, some wisdom of the world, even a quaint rarity of situation
in Trial and Error, that proves the writer's possession of the literary
sense. Beyond that, they are all literately and competently written.
If there is no formula for success in those very general considera-
tions, there is at least a refuge for the reader’s self-esteem.

Ill

Yet if it seems impossible to find a common denominator for the
preferences of detective-story readers, the question still persists:

520

Harrison R. Sleeves

Why do you and I read these things? Why, particularly, when we
know the formula so well, and when the studied variations upon
the inevitable theme only attest the limitations of the theme itself?
We know they are agreeable rot, in the main. If they may be pro-
ficiently written, they are usually not. We seem, like the patient two
outside the gates of Heaven in Dunsany’s play, to reach toward that
slow-motion shower of empty beer bottles in the agonizing hope that
one, by unthinkable good luck, may be a full one.

Perhaps the first reason for the acceptableness of the detective
story is its relative brevity. No distinctive literary type outside the
drama is more definitely cut to length. A rapid reader can read a
detective story in a three-hour sitting, a slow one, in six hours —
two evenings at home. A man can undertake that much without the
feeling that he has a contract on his hands. But if half his diversion
after business hours is found outside the four walls of his house, he
might count the number of nights it would take to get to the 786th
and final page of the novel over which his wife has been gasping
admiration. On the other hand, the detective story is not too short.
The story magazine is well enough for short sessions, but too
sketchy, too scattered, for the four-hour stretch before bedtime.

Then there is its tonic cheerfulness. Detective fiction is in reality
a standing defiance of crime, social disorder, and all the varieties of
calculated bad luck that may befall good people. In the end every-
thing comes right. There is nothing in art — even in the lowest
forms — more unswervingly optimistic, and nothing more steadily
moral, at least in its acceptance of moral principles, though the
Olympian right-mindedness of the writer may traffic strangely with
those principles when an agreeable offender confronts them. This
optimism and this morality, however, organic as they are, are in no
sense critical or philosophic. They are casually and naturally ac-
cepted, as unexacting readers accept most simple views of life. On
the whole, the detective story and the ‘*crime story’' appeal to quite
different readers. The two types may cross, but the true detective
fan is impatient or disgusted if too much is made of the morbid
sensations of crime and crime-hunting. Multiple murders he in-
clines to regard as excessive; and for the noise and sweat of mere
gangster and police activity he feels a respectable contempt.

The good detective stories are not as a rule morbid. They focus

A Sober Word on, the Detective Story 521

in murder; but it is not the nature o£ the crime that intrigues us
— except in relation to the solution. I doubt whether we need ra-
tionalize the almost exclusive concern with murder. Murder is after
all the cardinal crime. Petty larceny would never do; and when
grand larceny, arson, or conspiracy is used it is only as a setting for
a good workmanlike murder. Kidnapping has had its place in the
grosser sort, but again as occasion for murder. Rape is for fairly
obvious reasons ‘"out.”

But there does seem to be a reason for the ubiquity of the mur-
der theme. Murder is irrevocable and irremediable. It may have
extenuations or justifications; it may even command active sym-
pathy; but its hard finality places the offender beyond the power
of compromise with the social temper or the usage of the law. Sym-
pathy can be vindicated only in the facile equity of a lenient con-
clusion. Yet, I repeat, the incidents and the character of the mur-
der are not matters of leading interest; a detective story is a story of
detection.

But most of all, in the nature of things, the sustained vogue of
detective fiction is dependent upon the type of challenge presented
in the actual treatment of the unvarying problem. The prevailing
view is that it is a challenge to the wits that holds us — patent as the
challenge may be. It is a game, a pleasantly and harmlessly agreeable
game of solitaire in which human beings take the place of paste-
boards or pieces and the problems are problems of human activity.

But is that imagined challenge to the intellect any more than
imaginary? Does the detection story really rank with the “intellec-
tual diversions*? For the majority of readers I am inclined to think
not. I deeply doubt whether the process of deduction, as it is com-
monly called (though goodness knows the larger processes of de-
tection are inductive) is followed with the conscience that one
brings to chess, or even to contract bridge. We like to imagine the
scrupulous “fan** ticking off point after point of evidence, match-
ing character against character as the most promising suspect, carry-
ing throughout the narrative a complete picture of the interrela-
tions of events and characters, always on his caution of course
against that final turn of the trick which will both defeat and daz-
zle the unwary. When Poe and Conan Doyle flourished, the reader
did reason ahead — but in a straight line of well-oriented items of

Harrison R, Steeves

522

evidence which were carefully marked as the distinctive and neces-
sary ones. Conan Doyle followed Poe’s predilection for lucidity,
deliberately “planting” the clue, though he might suspend the bril-
liant act of reason that gave it its value.

To-day that is all greatly changed. The elaboration of devices
and expedients that attends the development of all arts (of all
genres, if you don’t like “arts”), and still more the vast extension
and diversification in the mechanics of actual scientific detection,
have quite naturally made the sowing of clues and the analysis of
them a much more complicated business. And the cultivation of
the reader in that immensely extended technic has forced the writer
more and more into the practice of bajBJement of a confusing and
sometimes even an oppressive sort. When A Study in Scarlet was
written, in 1887, there was no Bertillon system, no finger-printing;
there were no radio cars, no such battery of lethal devices, either
mechanical or chemical. But more important than that, there was
no widely organized system of police intelligence, no comparable
procedure in “forensic” science, and above all, no education of the
criminal in the evasion of any or all of the methods of scientific
detection. Holmes’s instant reconstruction of the leading features
of both crime and criminal in A Study in Scarlet would strike our
contemporaries as flashy and precipitate, and his tactics in the ap-
prehension of the criminal would simply be laughed at. But the
problem itself reposes in simple evidence simply handled.

To-day the writer of the detective story multiplies clues, mul-
tiplies suspects within an eligible dramatis persorue of at least four
or five characters, offers a choice of solutions which is finally deter-
mined on the principle of the reductio ad absurdum, and frequently
employs comprehensive time and place arrangements which re-
quire diagramming rather than arguing. Indeed, I have reached
the conviction that the detective-story writer should be obliged by
statute to supply all requisite maps, house plans, working diagrams,
and time schedules, and if the characters are many (and particularly
if they have no clearly defined personalities) he should furnish also
a descriptive dramatis persome. Stories so intricately contrived can
be interesting — ^witness Ngaio Marsh’s Death in a White Tie and
John Rhode’s Death Pays a Dividend — ^but it takes very good writ-
ing as well as elaborate routine to make them so.

A Sober Word on the Detective Story 523

But in stories of this type — and they are, after all, far the greater
part of our modern mystery stories — complication of matter and
method go far to defeat themselves. The casual reader tends to
accept the fact that the author can, and will, fool him, keeps the
maze of events loosely in his mind, and nonchalantly looks back over
the path of cause and effect (if it is at all clear) after he has reached
its end. The use of the mind hasn’t much place in that experience.
And it might be noted that the fascinating cases in the history of
actual crime are not of the ingenious order. The Crippen case, the
Becker case, the Hauptmann case all depended, at least in the retro-
spect, upon the assiduous working up of a few small but critical
items of evidence. Possibly the proof of the supposition that it is not
the unraveling of a confused problem that holds us is found in the
fact that the substitutes for the detective story in the form of crime
^'problem” books and “exercises” in detection have had no con-
sistent success.

No, I am sure the “good” reader is in the minority — and a small
minority at that. For the greater number of us the case is difierent,
and not so complimentary to the quality of our mental interests.
Possibly we can get at the reality through a pertinent analogy.

Men like machinery, any product of skill and imagination that
puts power into visible and continuous use. They like it at rest,
but so much more in motion, because then it is living the kind of
life that machines were meant to live. Dynamos, steam shovels,
streamlined locomotives and marine engines are all success stories.
The least technically informed of us men can hardly pass a battery
of compressed air drills or a road-making machine in operation
without a qualm of resentment that it is only adolescents and loaf-
ers who are permitted really to enjoy, for an hour on end, the work-
ing of a big and slick invention. It is not in the least necessary that
we understand the mechanics of the thing; it is just a magnificent
eye-filler. For a man the motor under the hood of his car is an ob-
ject of delight if not of affection; for a woman it is only a mystery,
and therefore troublesome and perhaps terrifying. All she wishes
to know about it is that it is nasty and oily and hot and refractory,

524

Harrison R, Steeves

and that the only person who can deal with such a thing properly
is another mystery in overalls. For a man the power-house across
the hill is a monument of beautiful efficiency and quiet energy.
For a woman it is an eyesore, and the source of the smoke that con-
taminates the week’s wash.

Under all the inaccuracy of this generalization there is an un-
deniable psychological truth. And it fits the detective story as it fits
the world of invention. We have the glowing sense of the mind in
action. But the mechanism of the mind is not presented by the
writer or perceived by the reader psychologically, for the matter of
the story is altogether concrete, and there is no particular concern
for the relation between idea and behavior. The story of mental
action has replaced the somewhat effete story of physical action —
Rob Roy and Treasure Island — ‘Which also seemed to interest men
more than women. By the same token murder, the almost unvary-
ingly standard subject matter, while it is felt by women as unpleas-
ant to the touch, is accepted by the less fastidious minds of men
simply as the raw material for the mental machine to work upon.
That is why men like it, and why at least a score of men read it
for every woman.

And that vicarious and fanciful spectator’s pride that we men feel
in the scientific and (we choose to think it) the male mind at
work, almost demands that the owner of that mind be a male. Even
the women writers seem to concede this. Agatha Christie has de-
parted from the precept in this respect, but she flatters us by giv-
ing to her pleasant motherly detective (who is not a professional)
a sedentary and intuitive shrewdness, accompanied by modest de-
nials of any special capacity beyond observation and common-sense.
And she has been presented to us, if I remember rightly, only in
short stories, episodes that demand no sustained or highly sys-
tematized application to detective routine. The basic equipment
of the story detective still remains what the male, by character, nur-
ture, and opportunity, seems able to supply. Practically every writer
of detective fiction recognizes that the anchorage of his story is a
precise imaginative mind in a masculine personality of some
uniqueness.

Here again the very determinants of interest in the type have
tended to decadence. The uniqueness of Sherlock Holmes lay not

A Sober Word on the Detective Story 525

in his mannerisms, his patronage of the adoring Watson, his co-
caine, or any other trifling attachments of the person, but in his im-
pressive consistency with himself and the part he had to play. He
was the detective fully in character. But the heritage of mannerism
has fallen heavily upon more up-to-date writers, and the search for
distinction has given us a flock of personalities who are unique in
quite a different way. I am bored by the airs and the parade, the
ostentatious savoir, of the Reginald Fortunes, the Philo Vances;
equally by the intrusive unpersonableness of Mr. Pinkerton and
Joshua Clunk. Ellery Queen, Monsieur Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey,
I can stand very well, though I am not greatly entertained by what
is adventitious in their characters, their velvet lives, or their esoteric
tastes. But occasionally I find myself fervently wishing that the
favorites of detective fiction would die quick but quiet deaths, or
that they might, in the saga style, breed clever sons and daughters
to take their places. Bentley’s singularly good story, Trent's Last
Case^ has as principal a perfectly normal and politely bred human
being, and until an unhappy year or two ago there was no reason to
think he would ever reappear in fiction.

This brings us to a final consideration — that the detective story
does not occupy so isolated a niche in literary art that it can dis-
pense with what is known as “good writing.” The besetting pain
of the informed reader’s experience is that there are so many of
them (and how can he avoid them?) that are scandalously badly
written, even down to the plainest requisites of grammar and syn-
tax. There are fewer, but far too many, pretentiously over-written.
And that failure to respect the “nothing too much” is peculiarly
disturbing in detective fiction because its, essential treatment is fac-
tual. That remains true no matter how dramatic the appeal of the
factual may be.

But the future? No one who has followed the history of the arts
has failed to be struck with the stench of a thoroughly extinct vogue.
The aesthetic record is full of those painful revelations that what
was thought to be good taste or tolerable taste is really bad taste.
The mystery type is still holding up surprisingly well, but it will
inevitably belong some day amongst the curiosa: the Gothics, the
sporting novels, the penny dreadfuls. For it is, like them, a freak, a
specialty. Perhaps even now the knowing ones, sensing its precari-

Harrison JR. Steeves

526

ous state, are accumulating first editions and queer rarities.

I should like to see the detective story renew its youth and flourish
— at least for my lifetime. But I painfully suspect that it has been
acquiring years as men acquire them, that what it has gained during
its prime in spread, in cleverness, in diversification, in actual
(though not consistent) power to stimulate the mind, has been
gained as men’s experience and aptitudes are gained, at the price
of hardened arteries and cellular disintegration and exhaustion of
physical resources. The signs of decadence seem unmistakable —
excessive ingenuity, dissonant cleverness, an infectious flippancy
and indifference to moral scruple; above all, a failure of humane
interest in those disorders of the soul that underlie desperate acts
and give them literary substance.

Yet the type has shown extraordinary stamina. It has lived power-
fully in spite of the aesthetic and the ethical doubts about it and
the ridicule of those who take their literature seriously. If it has
fallen into infirmity the doctors may still keep it going for a long
time to come. But when it is time for it to die we must be con-
tent to part from it as we do from the pleasantly aged, and shed no
restless tears beside its bier.

The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley
By Philip Van Doren Stern

0 000000000(f0000000h00006000600(ri^0000000000000000000 0^

There iSj so wise men have said, no surer sign of maturity than self-
criticism. The literally tremendous increase, on both sides of the
ocean, in the writing and publishing of crime-mystery-detective
fiction in the 1^20's and i^^ds brought in its wake trends and de-
velopments that called for the kind of sober re-examination and
plain speaking contained in the present selection, which first ap-
peared in the Virginia Quarterly Review for Spring 1^41. Even
those who believe — as does your editor — that Mr. Stern has over-
estimated both the villainy and the influence of the reactionary
professional*' detective story reader will presumably agree that
more of his reasoned and healthy pessimism in contemporary mys-
tery criticism would be a good thing for all concerned. Philip Van
Doren Stern is well known in the American literary scene as novel-
ist, biographer, editor, and publisher. Under a pen name he has
written at least one detective story of his own.

pOQQOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOQOpOOOQJ>QOOOOOOpOq(tOOOO_

This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the de-
tective story. No academic convocations are likely to be held to
celebrate it, nor will any great body of commemorative literature
be written for the occasion. Yet the detective story is a much dis-
cussed field of writing; it is of great importance to our publishing
and printing industries; and the circumstances of its birth were re-
spectable enough to warrant academic attention,

Edgar Allan Poe was its originator; the first of his stories to show
how a killing could be solved by pure ratiocination — *‘The Mur-
ders in the Rue Morgue” — appeared just a century ago in the April,
1841 issue of Graham's Magazine, a Philadelphia periodical of some
literary standing in its day, Poe, of course, was not the first to write

527

528 Philip Van Doren Stern

about murder. He had been preceded by hundreds of authors from
the recorder of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel to Thomas De
Quincey, who published the second part of his essay ‘'On Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts” only two years before “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” was printed. Nor was Poe the first to
make use of deduction as literary material. Ancient writers in a
dozen different lands had done that. But Poe was the first to write
the detective story as we know it today. He added the puzzle ele-
ment to the tale of murder; he gave us our first real detective — the
brilliant and eccentric Dupin; and he was the originator of the Dr.
Watson method of presenting a story through an observer who
tells how the sleuth went about solving the case. Poe’s rigidly logi-
cal structure has continued almost unchanged; his philosophical
asides are imitated to this day; his atmospheric effects have defied
successful imitation. Like printing, the detective story has been
improved upon only in a mechanical way since it was first invented;
as artistic products, Gutenberg’s Bible and Poe’s “The Murders
in the Rue Morgue” have never been surpassed.

In fact, it may be said that whatever artistic possibilities the
detective story had were realized at its birth. Certainly its modern
descendants are a poor lot. Nearly three hundred book-length mys-
teries — using the word “mystery” as a generic term for all crime fic-
tion to include the detective story, the murder story sans detection,
and the horror story — ^were published in 1940, but most of them
were as artless as radio soap-opera and quite as tiresome. Their writ-
ers forgot that murder implies the existence of a murderer; they
ignored the fact that killing is still a serious business, accompanied
in real life by very real emotions and fraught with genuine danger
and fear. Our mystery stories are long on gore and short on good
red blood; they are bedside stories for tired adults, intended to
put their readers to sleep from sheer boredom.

The fact that so many of them are written, published, bought,
and eagerly read simply proves that the genre has astounding vi-
tality, for it survives a flood of bad writing, a drought of ideas, and
the deadly attrition caused by endless imitation and counterimita-
tion.

There are critics, of course, who maintain that the detective story
has nothing to do with literature, that it is simply an intellectual

The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley 529

puzzle intended to amuse the reader by enabling him to dwell for a
few hours on solving an imaginary murder and so escape a real
world in which actual death daily becomes more imminent. But
this is to take the shallowest possible view of what is necessarily a
literary form; were the detective story only a puzzle there would be
no need to make it into a book complete with characters, back-
ground, and some attempt at good writing. The purely puzzle ele-
ment could be covered in a few hundred words. What is wrong with
the detective story of today is that it lacks literary value. It must go
beyond simple arithmetic to a higher field of aesthetic endeavor or it
is worth nothing at all.

There is nothing inherent in the mystery story that limits it as
literature. Its central core is almost always premeditated murder
(stories dealing with lesser crimes are never completely successful),
and premeditated murder is one of the greatest themes in all litera-
ture: witness such works as Electra, Hamlet^ and Crime and Pun-
ishment. If it is true that the average mystery story makes little
attempt to deal with the great drama of life and death, that is be-
cause it is an average mystery story, written by a hack. There is no
reason why a tale concerning itself with the most soul-racking deed
a human being can undertake should be a silly, mechanically con-
trived affair. The writer of murder mysteries holds high cards in
his hand; if he does not know how to play them, that does not lessen
their value.

Murder is a subject of universal interest; the study of it offers
most people their only experience with the emotion of terror; and
it carries with it the suspense and excitement of gambling for high
stakes, for the man who kills sets himself against all society and
risks his own life on being clever enough to outwit even his clever-
est fellow men. The reader can at will put himself either in the
place of the murderer or his pursuers and take part in the most
thrilling of all sports — ^the man hunt — as quarry or hunter.

It must be noted at this point that murder per se is likely to be
a more interesting and potentially richer subject than the mere de-
tection of it. A writer can be more eloquent about death than he
can about details of evidence or alibis. The reader instinctively
senses this, and as a result, the circulation of detective stories is con-
fined to a much smaller circle than is the reading of tales of mur-

530 Philip Van Doren Stern

der. No detective story published in this century has come near
achieving the wide popularity of a straightforward murder novel
like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And very few tales of detection
have the perennial vitality of Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes’s superb murder
story, The Lodger.

There is a timelessness, too, about the pure tale of murder or
horror that is lacking in nearly all detective stories, even the best
of them. To the modern reader who is honest with himself and not
overawed by reputation, the Sherlock Holmes detective stories,
great as they are, are beginning to take on a slightly antiquated
flavor. Poe's tales of ratiocination are period pieces in many re-
spects, but their artistry saves them from seeming dated. They also
have the advantage of using only the simplest of means. Nothing
makes a detective story appear outmoded so much as the employ-
ment of elaborate scientific methods which the progress of science
soon renders obsolete. Fingerprinting and chemical analysis have
sent hundreds of our older detective stories into the discard.

Simplicity of means, valid characters, and distinguished writing
are the qualities that best enable crime fiction to defy the ravages
of time. In that respect it will be seen that the mystery story does
not differ from other forms of literature.

Some element, not too well understood, seems to be at work to
damage both the sales and literary value of the mystery story. It
has been charged that book-trade customs and reviewing methods
which confine mysteries in a classification that is too rigid are re-
sponsible for their not reaching a wider audience. This, however,
is not enough of an explanation, for other kinds of books some-
times reach the best-seller lists despite all the obstacles placed in
their way by their own publishers. No detective story has become
enormously popular in our time — the sales even of such record-
breakers as the S. S. Van Dine books and Dashiell Hammett's The
Thin Man are insignificant compared with the sales of non-
detective best sellers, or with Miss du Maurier’s tremendously suc-
cessful story of murder.

The common belief that detective stories are enormously pop-

The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley 531

ular is simply not true; they are popular as a type, but no one of
them is read widely. A brief investigation into the methods of book
distribution will shed some light on this curious circumstance.

First of all, mysteries are not sold in any great quantity directly
to the public; probably as much as eighty-five per cent of all copies
circulated reach their readers through rental libraries which buy
the books and lease them out for a few pennies a day. Consequently,
relatively few copies of any one title will serve a great many read-
ers. This practice is at once the blessing and the curse of writing or
publishing mysteries. The rental library system insures a minimum
sale of about fifteen hundred copies for almost any mystery; it also
places a top limit of about thirty-five hundred copies for even the
best ones. Thus there can be little chance of loss — ^but also little
chance of great gain. Only a few well established authors can ex-
pect to see their books sell beyond the thirty-five hundred figure —
and even then not far beyond that figure. So if you have ever won-
dered why publishers charge two dollars for a short, cheaply made
mystery story, you will now understand that you are not supposed
to buy the book. The publisher is simply trying to get some return
from the rental libraries. Under our present system of distribution
two dollars is actually a very low price for a mystery story; the pub-
lisher knows he is not selling a book but is indirectly leasing out
reading privileges.

But one must go beyond book-trade customs to find out why mys-
tery stories rank so low in public esteem and as literature. Not even
the unprofitable rental system will explain the stalemate, although
it must be admitted that the prospect of earning only a few hundred
dollars by writing a full-length book discourages many good au-
thors from entering the field, especially since they cannot even hope
for serious critical attention as a result.

Investigation of the whole situation surrounding the writing,
publishing, selling, and reviewing of mysteries, reveals one little-
noticed fact: the mystery story is at a standstill because it is being
written for a purely professional audience.

Around each one of the many rental libraries scattered across the
country is a small but determined group of readers — ^most of them
men — ^who devour almost every mystery story published. They
take their daily dose of murder with the frenzied enthusiasm of a

532 Philip Van Doren Stern

drug addict. They know all the tricks; they have followed all the
detectives, erudite, dumb, exotically Oriental, depressingly home-
spun; they are familiar with all the ways a human being can be
put to death; they are better acquainted with the homicide laws
than a Leibowitz or a Darrow; there is nothing new to them under
the sun, and they complain continually that mysteries get worse
and worse. Yet Heaven help the writer who tries to give them any-
thing but the old familiar brand!

There is no use wasting time deploring the miserable lot of these
devotees who spend their lives so vicariously and so futilely. The
root of their devotion can probably be traced to an unhappy child-
hood, business worries, or a maladjusted sex life rather than to a
genuine interest in any kind of literature. Unfortunately, these
regular patrons of the rental libraries are the determining factor in
making success or failure for any mystery writer's work. They are
the ones who first read a new author's work; their approval induces
the rental library clerks trying to extend the possible market, to
recommend the story to those who are not mystery fans; their disap-
proval causes the new book to be shelved quietly.

Since this small group holds so much power it is obvious that
publishers cater to its tastes. Writers are encouraged to repeat old
formulas, since there is nothing which is more of an anathema to a
drug addict than a change of narcotics. The mystery story goes
round and round but it never goes forward. Originality is stifled
and orthodoxy reigns supreme.

All kinds of extraneous novelties have been injected into the
basic pattern of the mystery story to lend it some freshness: cooking
recipes, learned dissertations on campanology, and much second-
rate humor have been utilized to give the reader what is known in
merchandising as ‘*plus value." But these subsidiary devices are
simply evidence of a decadence that is now far advanced. No such
trivial means can rescue the mystery story from the sterility that
comes from long inbreeding.

Ill

The great need of the mystery story today is not novelty of ap-
paratus but novelty of approach. The whole genre needs overhaul-

The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley 533

ing, a return to first principles, a realization that murder has to do
with human emotion and deserves serious treatment. Mystery story
writers need to know more about life and less about death — more
about the way people think and feel and act, and less about how
they die.

The mystery story is concerned with murder and its detection and
nothing else. Yet the reactions of its characters count most. The
mind of the murderer, the intellect of the detective, the quirks of
behavior of the minor characters give it interest. It must always
treat its main subject with tespect; Keystone cops and wisecrack-
ing detectives are out of place in the presence of a corpse, and it
cannot be pleaded that police handling of an actual killing often
has its low-comedy aspects. An artist cannot take his material from
life and reproduce it stenographically — ^he must select and heighten.
When he makes murder the central theme of his story he needs to
utilize those aspects of murder which make their greatest appeal
to the reader. Humor or erudition are only adventitiously con-
nected with his theme; his major concern is with death and horror
and the unknown, with fear and uncertainty, and finally with solu-
tion, consummation, catharsis.

There is a simple test which can be used to judge a mystery story.
Put yourself in the place of the murderer. Then ask whether you
would go about killing a man in the way indicated in the story
under consideration. Would you put bacteria-infected cheese mites
In the Stilton the butler is about to serve to the gentleman you
want to slay? Would you transmit your instructions tattooed in
ideographs on the posterior of a Chinese orphan? Of course you
would not, and thus you immediately know the story is trash. Would
you, as a potential murderer, undertake the exceedingly danger-
ous business of killing with a lighthearted whimsical attitude when
you know a slip so slight as leaving a fingerprint can send you to
your own death? The shadow of the noose is already falling on you
when you contemplate an act of murder; the hideous whine of high-
voltage current beats on your eardrums when you begin your plot-
ting!

In real life, if you are determined to put some one out of the
way, you will gp about your work with a deadly earnestness that
transcends every other interest. You will want to use straightfor-

534 Philip Van Doren Stern

ward methods, not devious ones. Even if you possess only animal
cunning you will soon realize that the best way to kill is to kill
simply and quickly. The man who uses a stout club on a dark street
has ten thousand chances of escape compared with the too clever
slayer who employs a rare poison distilled from the stings of Tibetan
honey bees, if for no better reason than that there are at least ten
thousand people who have ready access to a stick of wood com*
pared with those who can obtain an exotic poison. Too much in-
telligence is a limiting factor that may lead to identification. When
you are risking your own life the anonymity that comes from imi-
tating mankind’s widespread stupidity can be remarkably useful.

When you put yourself in the murderer’s place you will see, too,
that you do not want to involve yourself in any elaborate alibi,
especially in one that necessitates the use of undependable mecha-
nisms. Phonograph records that reproduce your voice while you are
away somewhere busily engaged in murder; string-and-pin devices
that enable you to lock the door to the room containing a dead
man who appears to have committed suicide; spring-discharged
pistols, automatic poisoned needles, and deadly tropical insects —
all have an awkward way of refusing to function smoothly at the
critical moment. You will not want to trust your own life to such
unsure instruments, for you will be acutely aware of the fact that
the arm of the law is long and its grip deadly. The stout stick in
the dark street is as good a way of killing as any and not likely to
fail. Nor will it be suspected that you were out lurking for your
victim if you use plain horse sense in arranging your murder. It
will be noted, also, that real murderers seldom depend on unusual
means or elaborate alibis. But then, real murderers have real lives
to risk so they naturally tend to be careful of them.

Mystery story writers have much to learn from life. They can
learn that their characters are most convincing when they act like
human beings and not like clever automatons; they can learn that
men have all sorts of odd motives for murder, and that they kill
more often for obscure and sometimes apparently trivial reasons —
which are nevertheless deeply rooted in sound psychology — than
they do for the possession of a trio of valuable postage stamps or the
right to inherit a lordly title. Mystery story authors may even dis-
cover the one elementary fact underlying the writing of all fiction

The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley 535

— that unless the reader is made to care about the characters in a
book he is utterly indifferent to their fates. As a corollary to this
they may find out that when fifty people are all equally suspected
of having committed a murder the reader is bored at the prospect
of having to see forty-nine of them eliminated before he can close
the book with a sigh of relief. They should be made to realize, too,
that when the culprit turns out to be a character so obscure that
his own unimportance in the story has concealed him from view,
the reader has a right to feel angry. The murderer cannot be so
meanly subordinated. He is, after all, the prime mover of the story.
Without him there can be no plot, no action, no suspense. He needs
to be a major figure, clever, desperate, and strong, for the man hunt
is interesting only when the quarry is worthy of the chase.

In addition to emphasis on character the mystery story has need
of that quality with which Poe endowed it at birth — atmosphere.
Murder is a child of darkness, a friend of night and storm, a dweller
in ancient habitations where the rook and the raven keep watch.
It seems oddly out of place in our neonlighted streets; it is reduced
to journalistic triviality by gang warfare; it suffers from the tempo
of modern life. Only by making use of its natural terrors and restor-
ing it to its pristine dignity can we hope to see murder again made
worthy of being considered one of the fine arts. Let us hope that the
second century of the mystery story’s development will witness its
coming of age, for in its present condition the one quality it lacks
above all others is maturity. It is surely strange that an age so deeply
concerned with death as our own has not yet made its mark upon
an art that deals only with death.

The Whodunit in World War II and After
By Howard Haycraft

The survey-and-summary which follows was published in the New
York Times Book Review for August 12,

5 Q Q 0 Q 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 P 9 0,QjuijLJUUUliUliLlUUUUlJl^^

At the height of the Nazi blitz of London in 1940 special ‘Yaid
libraries” were set up at the reeking entrances to the underground
shelters to supply, by popular demand, detective stories and noth-
ing else. No more dramatic illustration can be imagined of the
singular appeal of the once lowly and scorned whodunit as the
chosen escapist literature of modern times in general and wartime
in particular, American readers have not been called on to give
such convincing proof of their devotion. But corroborative evi-
dence of a quieter sort is not lacking in this country, on the moving
picture screen and the radio waves as well as in the bookshop and
the library.

Unlike the First World War, when the detective story dropped
nearly from sight, the present conflict has stimulated publication
of the form to new highs. This is true despite a slight reduction in
the number of new titles. For it is in the low price, pocket size re-
print field that the whodunit — using the term in its widest and
commonly accepted generic sense to include all related tales of
mystery and crime with a perceptible thread of detection — ^has truly
come into its own. One needs no dry statistics, but only to see the
familiar gaudy paper covers in buses, railway coaches, and subway
cars, to know that vastly more people are reading mystery-detective
stories today than ever before. Meanwhile the pattern is being
duplicated overseas, where hundreds of thousands of Americans in
uniform are acquiring the habit by exposure to the widely popular
hip pocket Armed Services Editions.

536

The Whodunit in World War 11 and After 537

What this new audience means for the post-war period, when
paper restrictions are removed, is a prospect that titillates the
salivary glands wherever publishers, authors, and agents gather.
Many of these are seriously convinced that the pocket size volume
is the indicated physical shape of the detective story of the future,
and that five years’ time or less may see most mykeries published
originally in low price paperback editions of 100,000 copies or
more the initial printing. Time alone will prove the accuracy of
these prophecies. If such a change from present practices does oc-
cur, it will in all probability come about gradually, not overnight.

The quality side of the whodunit balance sheet during the war
years presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, the gen-
eral level of technical and literary craftsmanship in the mystery-
detective tale has never been higher. On the other, there have been
relatively few individual efforts that can be called inspired, few
exciting discoveries, in the period under consideration. A time of
“static competence,” one critic has called it. This is pretty obviously
the result of the inevitable disruptions of war (and suggests the pos-
sibility of a post-war detection renaissance like that of the 1920’s).
How many brilliant performances in this as in all walks of litera-
ture have been postponed — at the least — by the physical fact of
war can only be conjectured.

But if the martial years have produced few mystery landmarks
(in the sense that the first stories of Dorothy Sayers and S. S. Van
Dine and Francis lies and Dashiell Hammett are hallowed ground
to the true whodunit addict) there has been no dearth of compe-
tent and entertaining new blood (no pun intended). No span of
years can be called sterile which introduced, in America alone,
such capable or better newcomers (in approximate order of their
appearance) as Raymond Chandler, A. A. Fair, Craig Rice, Hugh
Pentecost, Dorothy B. Hughes, Cornell Woolrich, the Lockridges,
Elliot Paul, Marion Randolph, Cleve Adams, Lawrence Treat,
Frank Gruber, Elizabeth Daly, Barber and Schabelitz, David
Keith, Frances Crane, David Dodge, H. R. Steeves, Virginia Per-
due, F. W. Bronson, Mitchell Wilson, Katharine Roberts, Mary
Collins, Richard Sale, William Irish, Vera Caspary, H. R. Hays,
Margaret Millar, A. R. Hilliard, Stanley Hopkins, Jr., Lucy Cores.
Ruth Fenisong, C. W. Grafton, Margaret Carpenter, Matthew

538 Howard Haycraft

Head, Samuel Rogers, Doris Miles Disney, Hilda Lawrence, H. W.
Roden, Bruno Fischer, Rosemary Kutak, Joel Townsley Rogers —
to name only those who come first to mind.

British debutants during the period were naturally fewer. Ar-
ranged in the order that they became known to American readers,
these include Raymond Postgate, Anne Hocking, E. H. Clements,
Selwyn Jepson, Dan Billany, H. F. Heard, Manning Coles, E. X.
Ferrars, Patrick Hamilton, Chris Massie, George Bellairs, Cyril
Hare, Donald L. Henderson, P. W. Wilson, L. A. G. Strong, Nigel
Balchin, and (to follow the Empire) A. W. Upheld and A. E. Mar-
tin, two promising beginners from Down Under.

The French roman policier^ never widely translated in America,
virtually ceased to exist after the fall of Paris and has not yet re-
cuperated, so far as can be ascertained. But the translated Inspector
Maigret tales of Georges Simenon (though published in the land
of their origin well before the war) achieved their greatest and de-
served American popularity during the period under review.

If I were compelled to nominate the three or four new writers of
the years 1939-45 who are most likely to be bracketed by future
historians with Sayers and Van Dine and lies and Hammett — ^for
distinction, originality, and influence in their chosen field — my
vote would go to two Americans, one Englishman, and one French-
man: Raymond Chandler, Dorothy Hughes, Raymond Postgate,
and Simenon. (In addition to these, special ‘‘oscars'* might profit-
ably be awarded to Craig Rice and Mr. and Mrs. Lockridge for
services above and beyond the call of duty in behalf of the light-
hearted crime novel.) It is interesting, if possibly not indicative, to
note that each of these writers made his initial bow in the early
years of the period, before the serious military phases of the war
began. It is considerably more significant that each in his own fash-
ion represents an extension and advancement of the outstanding
development which characterized the mystery story in the 1930's:
the movement away from the mechanical formula whodunit and
toward the novel of manners and character with a crime motif.

Aside from this continuation of an earlier movement, no major
developments in detective-mystery technique have distinguished
the war years. However, one or two topical trends are worth com-
ment. As might have been predicted, the espionage theme has been

The Whodunit in World War II and After 539

used extensively and effectively. (Oddly enough, other than in
variations of the espionage theme, the war has figured only casually
as '‘material’' for the whodunit.) In general the spy stories of this
war have been agreeably free of the cliches of the old Oppenheim-
Le Queux school of intrigue, following instead the naturalistic pat-
tern established by John Buchan and developed by Eric Ambler
and Graham Greene in the years between the wars. Two new writ-
ers whose espionage tales entitle them to rank with these undoubted
masters are Manning Coles in England and Dorothy Hughes in
America.

A related trend, possibly more lasting in its technical implica-
tions, is the augmented awareness of personal peril, both physical
and psychological, to be found in an increasing number of mysteries
today. This development is rapidly achieving the status of a dis-
tinguishable sub-species, called, with some ambiguity, the “sus-
pense” story (often but not necessarily with an espionage back-
ground); and is regarded in some quarters as a logical and belated
reaction against both the immobility and improbability so fre-
quently complained of in run-of-the-mill detective stories.

As someone has remarked, detection as well as crime requires a
motive. Too often in the pedestrian whodunit there is no plausible
reason why the sleuth — ^whether “private eye” working for coffee
and cakes, or meddling amateur working for nothing — should make
himself a clay pigeon; and when he does, the reader yawns. (While
if the professional police are involved, the action tends as a rule
to be even more static.) Confronted with this dilemma, the “sus-
pense” story restores, or attempts to restore, excitement, imme-
diacy, urgency (one might almost say amateur standing) to the de-
tective novel by the device of enmeshing the central character in a
web of circumstance from which there is no escape save to fight
(detect) his way out. The fact that the personal peril motif has been
found well suited to moving pictures and the radio is not likely
to lessen its future popularity.

One exception must be recorded to an earlier statement. Coun-
ter to the general rise in technical craftsmanship, the level of writ-
ing in the hardboiled whodunit has become disturbingly synthetic
and desultory. Recalling the brave days of Hammett, it is a little
sad to find the tough gentry (with the exception of Raymond

540 Howard Haycraft

Chandler, A. A. Fair, and one or two others) mistaking activity for
action, alcoholism for humor, and pornography for realism. Since
the cause of this is nothing more serious than laziness, the cure is
obvious and indicated.

Balancing this disappointing trend, there has been a gratifying
decline in the coy and self-conscious style of American-feminine
over-writing variously called the Had-I-But- Known or Terror-in-
the-Attic school. Longsuffering readers need no reminder of the
spinster-narrator who “forgets’* (she was baking bread that morn-
ing) to tell the sheriff about the bloody axe she found in the wood-
shed with the murderer’s fingerprints on it, thereby causing five
more brutal deaths — and incidentally stringing out a wabbling
plot another 200 pages. (Worse still the heroine who deliberately
conceals vital evidence from The Law, with the same net result.)
But happily the ridicule which has been heaped on this sort of mere-
triciousness in recent years is beginning to bear fruit. And high
time tool

In past years the translation of the detective story to the moving
picture screen has been something less than successful. Recently,
however, Hollywood has stopped underestimating the intelligence
of its audience and has demonstrated that it can construct adult and
exciting screen drama on the mystery framework, with emphasis on
character and suspense. With such superior examples on record as
“Double Indemnity,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Rebecca,”
“Suspicion,” “Murder, My Sweet,” “Laura,” and “Phantom Lady”
— to mention but a few^ — the film whodunit has definitely come of
age.

No comparable maturity can be claimed for the American radio
mystery, which for a variety of reasons is still relying largely on
third-rate imitations of the “Thin Man” formula or juvenile melo-
dramatics for its results. There are, of course, exceptions. Perhaps
the most effective type of radio mystery to date is the simplified first-
person “suspense” drama, as typified by the program of that name.
On a purely quantitative basis whodunit addicts can have little
complaint: I am told the coming autumn season will see no less
than fifty separate programs of a mystery nature on the air.

The necrology of the years under consideration has not been ex-
tensive. In America, S. S. Van Dine, Carolyn Wells, Hulbert Foot-

The Whodunit in World War II and After 541

ner, and Virginia Perdue were recorded in the obituary columns;
in England, the beloved dean of the form, R. Austin Freeman, to-
gether with Ernest Bramah, Lord Charnwood, and Helen Simpson;
in France, Maurice Leblanc, the creator of Arscne Lupin. Of these,
only Miss Simpson died as the result of enemy action. (The only
character to become a war casualty would seem to be Mr. Moto.)

Miscellaneous events during the war years which have affected
or are likely to affect the reading and writing of whodunits include
the founding of the Detective Book Club by Walter Black; the
establishment of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine^ the first suc-
cessful “class” magazine in the field; and the recent organization
of Mystery Writers of America, Inc., a professional group similar
to the older London Detection Club.

By actual evidence of the printed word, more serious critical
thinking has been devoted to the whodunit in the last few years
than in any comparable period in its history. An imposing array
of American, English, and French intellectuals have publicly pon-
dered the causes, significance, and probable directions of crime fic-
tion, among them Louise Bogan, Edmund Wilson, John Strachey,
Joseph Wood Krutch, Jacques Barzun, W. Somerset Maugham,
Raymond Chandler, Elliot Paul, Nicholas Blake, Vincent Starrett,
Philip Van Doren Stern, Anthony Boucher, Harrison R. Steeves,
Roger Callois, Jean Cassou, Mary McCarthy, H. R. Hays, Bernard
De Voto, and George Orwell.

These critics and their opinions may be divided roughly into
four principal categories: (1) the viewers-with-alarm, like Edmund
Wilson, who have looked upon the whodunit and find it bad;
(2) the seekers-after-truth, as typified by Krutch, Bogan, Callois, and
Blake, who are primarily concerned with the still-unanswered
“why?” of crime fiction; (3) the fundamentalists, the Barzuns and
McCarthys, who, one infers, would restrict the form forever to the
narrow confines of the “pure” detective story, unsullied by such
heresies as style or thought; (4) the diametrically opposed camp, the
non-fencers-in, led by Stern and Hays, who hold that the genre
must have unlimited room for growth and expression if it is to
retain the privileged position it now occupies.

Most serious well-wishers of the 'tec, I am convinced, adhere to
the last view, if only for reasons of enlightened selfishness, and are

542 Howard Haycraft

in substantial agreement that the time has come for the whodunit
to discard its dogmatism. Like all literary types, the detective story
in the period of its development required a rather rigid and arbi-
trary set of standards to protect and guide its growth into ways that
were good. With the arrival of maturity, these once sustaining
molds have largely outlived their usefulness. This does not mean
that the goals of the old disciplines (as, for example, the fair-play
credo) need be lost; any more than the grown tree loses its strength
when the stakes and wires which supported it as a sapling are taken
away. But failing such removal at the proper time, both tree and
literary form can be permanently harmed.

Fortunately for its admirers, the whodunit appears to be evolv-
ing in the advocated direction. More puzzle of character and less
of mechanics, higher and unashamed literary value, more hu-
manity, humor, and fear, less “plot’' and more story, are quietly
going into the making of detective stories today than a decade or
even five years ago.

Vincent Starrett has suggested half-seriously that the day may
come when the novel of manners will engulf the detective story,
with the result that we shall ultimately have novels about detectives
as we now have “novels about clergymen and physicians and pea-
nut vendors.” Possibly the alternative {pace Edmund Wilson!) is
for the whodunit to take over the novel of manners.

"^nnniroinnnrtRnnnsTnnnrT^nnnn^^

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

POOOOOOO 0 p P OOOQOOpQpOpQOOppOQOOq.OOOpOOOO 0J(L0 ppoj)ooooo

Gratitude has been expressed in the Foreword to those writ-
ers, editors, and critics who composed special articles and essays for
this volume. Grateful acknowledgment is additionally made to the
following individuals and firms for permission to reprint selec-
tions which originally appeared in other books or journals (such
sources are indicated in the introductions to the individual selec-
tions):

To Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. for G. K. Chesterton’s “A De-
fence of Detective Stories”; R. Austin Freeman’s “The Art of the
Detective Story,” copyright 1940; and Stephen Leacock’s “Murder
at $2.50 a Crime,” copyright 1937.

To Oxford University Press for E. M. Wrong’s “Crime and De-
tection.”

To Charles Scribner’s Sons for Willard Huntington Wright’s
“The Great Detective Stories,” copyright 1927, and S. S. Van Dine’s
“Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” copyright 1936.

To Ann Watkins, Inc. for Dorothy L. Sayers* “The Omnibus of
Crime,” copyright 1929, and “Gaudy Night” and John Dickson
Carr’s “The Locked Room Lecture,” copyright 1935.

To Marjorie Nicolson for “The Professor and the Detective,”
copyright 1929.

To William Collins Sons & Company, Ltd. for H. Douglas Thom-
son’s “Masters of Mystery.”

To The University of Chicago Press for Vincent Starrett’s
^The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes/’ copyright 1933, i960.

543

544 Acknowledgments

To D. Appleton-Century Company, Inc. for Howard Haycraft’s
“Murder for Pleasure/’ copyright 1941.

To Joseph Wood Krutch for “Only a Detective Story,” copy-
right 1944.

To A. P. Watt & Son for Monsignor Ronald A. Knox’s “De-
tective Story Decalogue,” copyright 1929.

To Sydney A. Sanders for Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art
of Murder,” copyright 1944.

To Little, Brown & Company for Ogden Nash’s “Don’t Guess,
Let Me Tell You,” copyright 1940.

To the Estate of Christopher Ward for the late Mr. Ward’s “The
Pink Murder Case,” copyright 1929.

To Lt.-Col. Richard Armour for “Everything Under Control,”
copyright 1941.

To Robert J. Casey for “Oh, England! Full of Sin,” copyright

1937-

To Methuen & Company, Ltd. for E. V. Lucas’ “Murders and
Motives,”

To Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for the Editor’s remarks
in “Four Mystery Reviews,” copyright 1946,

To Leland Hayward, Inc. for Dashiell Hammett’s review of The
Benson Murder Case, copyright 1927, and “From the Memoirs of
a Private Detective,” copyright 1923.

To Willis Kingsley Wing for ^nthony Boucher’s “The Ethicf
of the Mystery Novel,” copyright 1944.

Acknowledgments 545

To Edmund Wilson and the New Yorker for Mn Wilson’s “Who
Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” copyright 1945 The F.-R.
Publishing Corporation.

To Peter Davies, Ltd. for Nicholas Blake’s “The Detective Story
—Why?’’

To Ellery Queen for “Leaves From the Editors’ Notebook” and
“The Detective Short Story,” copyright 1941.

To R. Philmore for “Inquest on Detective Stories.”

To John Barker Waite for “The Lawyer Looks at Detective Fic-
tion,” copyright 1929.

To Constable & Company, Ltd. for John Carter’s “Collecting
Detective Fiction.”

To Harrison R. Steeves and Harper's Magazine for Mr. Steeves’
“A Sober Word on the Detective Story,” copyright 1941.

To Philip Van Doren Stern for “The Corpse in the Blind Alley,”
copyright 1941.

To the New York Times Book Review for Howard Haycraft’s
“The Whodunit in World War II and After,” copyright 1945.

Index

ABC Murders, The, 499
Abbe Montrose, 64
Abbot, Anthony, 478
Ablewhite, Godfrey, 92,
380

Abner, Uncle, 41, 55, 66,
97, 408, 479, 505
“About the Disappearance
of Agatha King,” 478
“About the Perfect Crime
of Mr. Digberry,” 478
Above Suspicion, 493
Abrahams, Doris Caroline,
499

“Absent-Minded Coterie,
The ” 479

Achievements of Luther
Trant, The, 490, 493,

498

Achilles, 20

“Act of God, An,” 55, 97
Adores Blood, 483
Adams, Cleve F., 303, 389,
494. 537

Adams, Samuel Hopkins,
414. 479

Addison, Lt.-CoL H. R.,

487

Ade, George, 481
Adjusters, The, 79
Adler, Irene, 157, 317
Advance Agent, 388
“Adventure of Black Peter,
The,” 154

“Adventure of the Abbey
Grange, The,” 317
“Adventure of the Bruce-
Partington Plans, The,”

488

“Adventure of the Clothes-
Line, The,” 486
“Adventure of the Copper
Beeches, The,” 129
“Adventure of the Creep-

ing Man, The,” 152, 313
“Adventure of the Dancing
Men, The,” 67
“Adventure of the Devil’s
Foot, The,” 150
“Adventure of the Dying
Detective, The,” 149
“Adventure of the Empty
House, The,” 68, 313,

314. 315. 316. 317
“Adventure of the Engi-
neer’s Thumb, The,”

316.317

“Adventure of the Illus-
trious Client, The,” 316,

317

“Adventure of the Mazarin
Stone, The,” 68
“Adventure of the Noble
Bachelor, The,” 317
“Adventure of the Nor-
cross Riddle, The,” 486
“Adventure of the Nor-
wood Builder, The,”

316. 317

“Adventure of the Priory
School, The,” 73, 94
“Adventure of the Red
Circle, The,” 148
“Adventure of the Re-
markable Worm, The,”
486

“Adventure of the Second
Stain, The,” 318
“Adventure of the Speck-
led Band, The,”

67, 73

“Adventure of the Three
Students, The,” X50
“Adventure of the Two
Collaborators, The,”

486

“Adventure of Wisteria
Lodge, The,” 317

547

Adventures of Archer
Dawe, Sleuth-Hound,
The, 482

Adventures of Detective
Barney, The, 481
Adventures of Heine, The,
488

Adventures of Martin
Hewitt, The, 462
Adventures of Picklock
Holes, The, 486
Adventures of Sam Spade,
The, 410, 502
Adventures of Sexton
Blake, 79

“Adventures of Shamrock
Jones, The,” 486
Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes, The, 73, 472
Advokatenbauer, Der, 63
Aeneid, 72
Aesop, 73

“Affair at the Semiramis
Hotel, The,” 478
Affaire Lerouge, U, 45,
356, 458,477,501
Affaire Saint-Fiacre, U,
506

“African Millionaire,” 96
Agamemnon, 20
Ah, King, 483
Ainsworth, W. H,, 86
Alarum and Excursion,
494

Allan, Robert, 65
Allen, Grant, 96, 484
Allen, Hervey, 173
Allerton, Mark, 60
Alleyn, Inspector Roder-
ick, 403, 404

Allingham, Margery, 182,
246, 391, 393, 479, 498,

519

Alrnack the Detective, 469

Index

548

“Aluminium Dagger.
The/’ 68

Amateur Craclssman, The,
455

Amber Gods and Other
Stories, The, 406
Ambler, Eric, 246, 260,

261, 262. 371, 411, 492*
498» 539

Anderson, Frederick Irv-
ing, 484^ 485. 493
Anderson, Isaac, vi, $63-
366

Another*s Crime, 460
Anstey, Robert, 77
Apocrypha, The, 19, 42,

72> 74» 354. 457
Appleton, G. W., 471
Arabian Nights, The, 43
Arabian Nights* Murder,
The, 434, 493
Aram, Eugene, 19
Argent des Autres, V, 4^
Ariadne, 43
Aristagoras, 43
Arkwright, Richard, 470
Arlen, Michael, 408
Armadale, 89
Armed Services Editions,
536

Armour, Richard, 338

Army of Shadows, 247
ArncUffe Puzzle, The, 462
Arrest of Arsine Lupin,
The, 473

Arrow Pointing PJowhere,
500

Arsine Lupin Versus
Holmlock Shears, 473
Arsenic and Old Lace, 302
“Art of the Detective Sto-
ry, The,'* 50.

Ashby, R. C„ 498
Ashenden, or the British
Agent, 247, 261, 488, 504
Ashes to Ashes, 102
Ashton Kirk, Criminolo*
gist, 59

Ashton Kirk, Investigator,
59

Ashton Kirk, Secret Agent,
59

Ashton Kirk, Special De-
tective, 59

Ask a Policeman, 495

Astounding Crime in Tor-
rington Road, The, 495
At the Villa Rose, 52, 463,

504

Atkey, Bertram, 484
Atlay, J. B., 91
Au Rendei-vous des Terre-
Neuvas, 506
August, John, 388
Aumonier, Stacy, 483
Autobiography of a French
Detective From 1828-
1858, The, 468, 487
Autobiography of an Eng-
lish Detective, The, 468
“Avenging Chance, The,”
478

Aventures Extraordinaires
de Joseph Rouletabille,
Reporter, 62

Babylon, S^verac, 484
Bachmann, Lawrence, 504
Background to Danger,
246

Baffle Book, The, 132
Bailey, H. C., 23, 28, 51, 61,
69, 442, 463, 479, 482,
493 * 498, 519
Bailey, Dr. Margery, 506
Baines, C. E., 28
Baker Street Inventory: A
Sherlockian Bibliogra-
phy, 501

Baker Street Irregulars,
146. $11

Baker Street Journal, The,
501

Baker Street Studies, 456
Balchin, Nigel, 538
Balcony, The, 494
Balmer, Edwin, 490, 498
Balzac, Honors de, 19, 66
Bancroft, 138
Bande Rouge, La, 46
Bang! Bang!, 481
Bangs, John Kendrick, 485
Barber and Schabelitz, 537
Bardell, Mrs., 80.

Barnaby Rudge, 101, 160,
165

Barr. Black, 205
Barr, Robert, 53, 54, 479,
481, 485

Barraclough, Inspector.
479

Barrie, Sir James M., 486
Barry, Charles, 60
Barton, Eustace, 506
Barzun, Jacques, 178, 391,
394* 541

Baskerville, Sir Henry, 148
Bates, George, 162
Bayard, Oliver Weld, 247
Beast Must Die, The, 398,
433- 498
Beck, Paul, 414
Becker case, 523
Becq, Raoul, 414, 482
Beeding, Francis, 498
Beetle, The, 470, 494
Before Scotland Yard:
Classic Tales of Roguery
and Detection, 497
Before the Fact, 300, 503
Beginnings of Mr. P. J.

Davenant, The, 65
Behind Closed Doors, 46,
459

Behind Locked Doors, 52,
68

Behind That Curtain, 441
Behind the Bolted Doorf,
58, 68

Behold, Here*s Poison, 426,

432

Beichte des Herrn Moritz
von eleven, Die, 63
Bel, 19, 74

Bell, H. W., 146, 456
Bell, Josephine, 498
Bellairs, George, 498, 538
Bellamy Case, The, 54
Bellamy Trial, The, 111,
123, 502

Belloc, Hilaire, 116
Bennett, Arnold, 58, 462.
483,498

Benson Murder Case, The,

52 > 378* 382-383

Bentiron, Dr. Thaddeus,

Bentley, E* C.. 22, 30, 56,
6i, 98, 104, 142, 197, 288,
289, 378, 381-382, 464,
479^ 489* 495* 498, 518.
5«5

Beresford, J. D., 109
Berkeley, Anthony, 106,

Index

549

197. 432.. 465. 478. 486,

498, 519

Best Detective Stories of
ig28. The, 194, 457
Betteredge, Gabriel, 89, 90,
101, 105, 380
Beverley, Bill, 98
Bibliography of Edgar Al-
lan Poe, The, 472
Big Bozo Mystery, The, 58,
67, 69

Big Sleep, The, 222, 302,
307. 499

Bigger They Come, The,
501

Biggers, Earl Derr, 441,
478, 498

Billany,Dan,538
Billet Rouge, Le, 46
Bishop, John Peale, 507
Bishop, Morris, 503
Bishop Murder Case, The,

507

Bishop*s Crime, The, 498
Black, Walter, 541
Black Book, The, 488
Black Box Murder, The,
461

Black Carnation, The, 461
Black Circle, The, 28
Black Mask, 203-205, 379,

417

Blackbirder, The, 259
Blackshirt, 484
Blake, Franklin, 92, 104
Blake, Nicholas, 246, 398-
405, 432, 433, 434, 498.

541

Blake, Sexton, 80, 132, 469
Blakeney, T. S., 456
Blanche Fury, 506
Bleak House, 44, 512
Bleke the Butler, 482
Blochman, Lawrence G.,
267

Blood Money, 502
Blood Upon the Snow, 493
“Blue Murder," 483
"Blue Scarab, The," 67
Bodkin, M. McDonnell,
414,471.481

Bogan, Louise, 178, 181,
182, 541

Book of Murder, The, 493
Borden, Lizzie, 303

“Boscombe Valley Mys-
tery, The,” 67
Bosworth, Allan, 495
Boucher, Anthony, vi, 245-
249, 250, 254, 384-389,
489, 497, 498, 499, 502,

S03. 505. 54 •

Bouchon de Crystal, Le,

504

Boutell, Anita, 499
Bowers, Dorothy, 499
Boyd, Felix, 482
Brady, Old King, 179
Brahms, Caryl, 499
Bramah, Ernest, 23, 28, 53,
463, 479, 499. 541
Brampton, James, 407
Branson, H. C., 499
Brass Chills, The, 386
Bravo case, 106
Bredon, Miles, 479
Brett, 77

Brett, Ira George, 489
Bride's Castle, 495
Bride Wore Black, The,

507

Brighton Rock, 262-263
Brock, Lynn, 52, 101, 104,
109,465,499
Bronson, F. W., 537
Bronson-Howard, George,
488

Brooke, Loveday, 481
Brooklyn Murders, The,

79. 465

Brothers Karamazov, 430
Brought to Bay, or Experi-
ences of a City Detective,
468, 487

Brown, Charles Brockden,

517

Brown, Father, 3, 23, 24,
28, 30, 41, 50, 51, 61, 66,
68, 102, 145, 194, 288,
369, 40X, 408, 410, 412,
414, 463, 479, 481, 482
Brown, Zenith, 501
Bruff, Matthew, 380
Buchan, John, 27, 56, 140,
144, 260, 455, 499, 539
Buck, Pearl S., 480, 484
Bucket, Inspector. 44, 512
Buffalo Bill, 79
Bullet in the Ballet, A,
493* 499

Bullivant, Cecil Henry,
482

Bulwer-Lytton, E, G. E. L.,
86

Bunn, Smiler, 484
Bunny, 32, 77
Burack, A. S., vi
Burke, Thomas, 281, 484
Burke and Hare, 19
Burning Court, The, 371,
393» 499

Busman's Honeymoon,
219* 433* 506

By Force of Circumstances,
462

Cabinet Secrets, 488
Cacus, 73

Cain, James M., 494
Cain and Abel, 472, 528
Calamity Town, 506
Call Mr, Fortune, 51, 463
Callois, Roger, 541
Cambiaire, C. P., 167
Campbell, Scott, 482
Campion, Albert, 479, 498
Canaday, John, 50a
''Canary" Murder Case,
The, 52

Cancelled in Red, 494
Canler, M., 468, 487
Cannan, Joanna, 499
Cape Cod Mystery, The,
495

Capes, Bernard, 107, 494
Captain Gardiner of the
International Police, 65
Capture of Paul Beck,
The, 471

Capuana, Luigi, 64
Cards on the Table, 435
Carlyle, Louis, 28
Carpenter, Margaret, 499,
537

Carr, John Dickson, 197,
257, 273-286, 301, 371,
391* 393, 394, 403, 408,
434* 4782 489* 493*499*
500, 507

Carrados, Max, 23, 28, 41,
53* 65* 782 90* 410, 413*
483* 479

Carstairs, Marion, 368
Garter, John, 407, 453-475
Carter, Nick, 179, 469, 479

Index

550

Ca$e*Book of Jimmie Lav-
ender, The, 4^®

Case of George Candle-
mas, The, 471
“Case of Identity, A,” 73
“Case of Lady Sannox,

The,*’ 73

Case of Miss Elliott, The,

“Case of Mr. Foggatt,

The,” 67

Case of Mortimer Fenley,
The, 462

Case of Oscar Brodski,

The, 15

Case of the Baker Street
Irregulars, The, 245» 499
Case of the Counterfeit
Eye, The, 502
Case of the Giant Killer,
The, 499

Case of the Lame Canary,
The, 268

"Case of the Missing Patri-
archs, The,” 4S6
Case of the Seven of Cal-
vary, The, 245, 499
Casey, Robert J., 34S'S5i
Cask, The, 59^61, 256, 43L
464, 472> 50®

Caspary, Vera, 303, 37
495» 537

Cassou, Jean, 541
Cat and the Canary, The,
302

“Cat Burglar, The,” 69
Cafs Eye, The, 68
Caught at Last, 470
Challenge to the Reader,

497 ^ ^

Chamaleon, Das, 64
Chambers, Dana, 494
Chambers, Whitman, 494
Champion From Far
Away, The, 483
Chan, Charlie, 442,

49»

Chandler, F. W., 2
Chandler, Raymond, 71,

182, 222-237* 3®2* 3®7*
370, 3S6, 391*395. 492*
499* 537* 53®. 54®* 54i
"Chapter on Autography,
A,” 36 ^

Charles, Nick, 301, 47^

Charnwood, Lord, 116,

494* 541

Charteris, Leslie, 388, 411,
484

Charteris Mystery, The,

Chase, James Hadley, 506
Chdteau Noir, Le, 62
Chaucer, 43
Checkmate, 88, 92
Chekhov, Anton, 484
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 2,
3-6* 4* 23, 50, 51, 61, 67,
68, 6g, 82, 84, 102, iq6,
107, 116, 132, 138, 194,
197, 209, 281, 288, 408,
412, 414* 457* 463. 479*
481* 499

Chetwynd, Dennis, 413
Chetwynd, Dr., 413
Cheyney, Peter, 246, 247,
387, 484, 489, 499
Chez les Flammands, 506
Chicago Murders, The,

239

Chinese Jar, The, 461
Chinese Orange Mystery,
The, 267, 434, 505
Chinese Parrot, The, 498
Chingachgook, 85
Chink in the Armour,
The, 58

Chipperfield, Robert Orr,
102, 107, 465
Christie, Agatha, 22, 23,
3®* 51* 69* 98* 107. 11®*

141, 179, 182, 194, 229,

249. 354* 4®8* 41®* 411*

430* 433* 435* 441* 464*

479* 482, 499* 524
Chronicles of Martin Hew-
itt, 462
Cicero, 43

Circular Staircase, The,
259, 506

Clack, Drusilla, 380
Clarice Dyke the Female
Detective, 471
Clark, Alfred Alexander
Gordon, 502
Clason, Clyde B., 499
Clay, Colonel, 484
Cleek> Hamilton, 280
Cleek, The Man of the
Forty Faces, 481

Clements, E. H., 493* 5®®*
538

Clendening, Logan, 486
Clerical Error, A, 495
Clue of the New Pin, The,

Clue of the Silver Key,

The, 455

Clues From a Detective* s
Camera, 471
Clues of the Caribbees,

6®7

Clues, or Leaves From a
Chief Constable*s Note
Book, 468, 487
Clunk, Joshua, 369, 493,

498* 525

Cobb, Irvin S., 484
“Cdcaine,” 307
Cody, Phil, 204
Coffin for Dimitrios, A,

371* 492* 498

Cohen, Octavus Roy, 54,
480, 484, 490
“Coin of Dionysius, The,”
65

Cole, G. D. H. and M., 79,
465, 481, 500
Coles, Cyril, 500
Coles, Manning, 246, 371,
5®®* 538* 539
Collecting Detective Fic-
tion, 453

Collier, John, 253
Collin, Philip, 64, 484
Collins, Mary, 537
Collins, Wilkie, 20, 21, 22,
44* 45. 72* 79* 89* 9®. 9L
92, 95, 101, 181, 209, 303,
378, 379-38®. 455, 457*
458* 471* 474* 50®* 517
Colonel Gore*s Second
Case, 52

Colonnello, II, 64
Colour Scheme, 504
Colt, Thatcher, 478
Colton, Thornley, 53
Comlyn Alibi, The, 471
Complete Dashiell Ham-
mett, The, 502
Complete Sherlock
Holmes, The, 500
Compound for Death, 494
Confidential Agent, The,
261, 262, 502

Index

551

Connington, J. J., 105, 500
Constance Dunlap, 79
Continental Operative,
The, 205, 417, 502
Cooper, James Fenimore,

85. 93

Copplestone, Bennett, 56,
414, 488

Cores, Luqr, 500, 537
Count Robert of Paris,

Country of the Blind, The,
53

Cowper, Joan, 79

Cox, A. B., 486, 498, 503
Coxe, George Harmon, 494
Craft of Fiction, The, 98
Cragg, E. H., 469
Crane, Frances, 537
Crawford, F. Marion, 73
Crawfurd, Oswald, 489
Cri du Sang, Le, 46
Crime and Detection, 18,

456. 498

Crime and Punishment,
256. 430 * 529

Crime and the Criminal,
The, 470

Crime at Diana*s Pool,
The, 97

Crime Conductor, The,
433

Crime de V Omnibus, Le,

458

Crime de VOpira, Le, 458
Crime de Rouletabille, Le,
62

Crime d*Orcival, Le, 458
Crime of Laura Sarelle,
The, 506

Crippen case, 523
Crofts, Freeman Wills, 22,
26, 30, 59, 60, 61, 76, 78,
84, 106, 108, 132, 133,
229, 255, 257, 354, 369,
403 » 431 * 482 » 459 ^ iH*
500

Crook, Arthur, 369, 502
Crooked Binge, The, 493
‘^Crooked Man, The,** 278
Crossen, Ken, vi, 304-307
"Cryptography,** 36
Crystal Stopper, The, 474,
504

Cue for Murder, 504
Cuff, Sergeant, 45, 90, 91,
380. 455

Cunningham, A. B., 500
Cuppy, Will, 295, 373-376
Curiosities of Crime in
Edinburgh, 468, 487
Curious Mr, Tarrant, The,
491

Cut Direct, The, 495
"Cyprian Bees, The,** 479
CzaPs Spy, The, 65
Czissar, Dr. Jan, 411

D , Minister, 174

Dagger of the Mind, The,

235

Dagobert, Detektiv, 63
Dain Curse, The, 203, 370
Dale, Jimmie, 484
Dale, Martin, 484
Dallas, Duncan, 482
Daly, Carroll John, 203,
204, 205

Daly, Elizabeth, 500, 537
Dane, Clemence, 494
Dangerous Ground, 460
Dangerville Inheritance,
The, 471

Daniel, 19, 42,354
Dannay, Frederic, 406, 497
Danvers, Milton, 470
Dare, Susan, 481
Dark Deeds, 470
Dark Duet, 246, 499
Dark Road, 368
Darkness of Slumber, 405
Darrell, Jeff, 55
D’Artagnan, 44
Datchery, Dick, 21
Datchet Diamonds, The,
470

Davenant, F. J., 65, 481,
488

Dawson, Chief Inspector
William, 41, 56, 65, 488
Day Lewis, C., 398, 498
Deadly Is the Evil Tongue,
495

Dean, Elizabeth, 494
Dean, Robert George, 494
Death and Taxes, 494
Death at *'The Dog,** 499
Death From a Top Bat,

506

Death Has a Past, 499
Death in a Bowl, 507
Death in a White Tie, 504,
522

Death in the Deep South,

502

Death in the Dolls House,

504

Death in the Dusk, 495
Death in the Quarry, 500
Death of a Busybody, 498
Death of a Ghost, 498
Death of an Author, 504
Death of My Aunt, 495
Death Pays a Dividend,
522

Death Walks in Eastrepps,

498

Death Wears a White
Coat, 494

Decline and Fall of Every-
body, The, 373
Deductions of Colonel
Gore, The, 52, loi, 104,

465

Deerslayer, The, 85
Defendant, The, 3, 457
Defoe, Daniel, 19, 37, 39
DeLancey, King of
Thieves, 484
Delannoy, Burford, 471
De la Torre, Lillian, 498,
499, 500

Delf, Thomas, 407, 468,
487

Delicate Ape, The, 259,

503

Dell, Amen, 386
DeMarigny case, 207
Dene, Dorcas, 481
Dents du Tigre, Les, 67,

504

Depken, Friedrich, 128
De Quincey, Thomas, 20,
92, i 35 > 136^ i 37 » 528
Derleth, August, 486
Detection Club, The, 197-
i 99 » 233, 304, 495, 497,

541

Detection Medley, 497
Detective and the Som-
nambulist, The, 459
Detective Book Club, 541
Detective Duff Unravels
It,4QO

553

Index

^'Detective Novel** et Uln-
fluence de la Pensie Sd-
entifique, Le, 128
Detective Short Story:

A Bibliography, The,
4^6

‘"Detective Story and
Academe, The,” 496
“Detective Story Book-
shelf, A,” 496

Detective*s Holiday, The,
60

Detective*s Note-Book,
The, 468, 487
Detective*s Triumph, A,
470

De Voto, Bernard, 178,

39 392> 393> 394» 54i
Diamond Coterie, The,
460

Diary of a Judge, 487
Diary of an Ex-Detective,
the, 468

Dickens, Charles, 21, 44,
75, 101, 379, 407, 457.

458. 483* 5 oo» 501

Dickson, Carter, 272, 273,
371, 391, 427, 433, 479,
493* 500
Diplomat, 453
Diprose* s Annuals, 489
Disappearance of Jere-
miah Redworth, The,

469

Disney, Doris Miles, 368,

494. 538

Disney, Dorothy Cameron,
494

Diversions of Dawson,
The, 56

Divinatione, De, 43
Dix, Constantine, 32, 66,

484

Dr, Cunliffe, Investigator,
482

Doctor Died at Dusk, The,

503

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
421

Doctor Priestley*s Quest,
49

Dn Thomdyke*s Crime
File, 501

Dr. Thomdyke*s Omni-
bus, 501

Doctor*s Crime, or Simply
Horrible, The, 470
Documents in the Case,
The, 209, 506
Dodd, Cedric, 491
Dodd Cases, The, 491
Dodge, David, 494, 537
Dodge, Louis, 55
Donovan, Dick, 470, 472,
481

Donovan of Whitehall, 65
Don*t Look Behind You!,
495

“Doomdorf Mystery, The,”
281

Door, The, 506
Dorcas Dene, 79
Dorcas Dene, Detective,

53. 471

Dorrington Deed Box,
The, 462
Dossier, Le, 458
Dossier No. ii), Le, 45, 47,
459

Dostoievski, 256, 430
Double-Barrelled Detec-
tive Story, A, 486
Double Four, The, 57
Double Indemnity, 301,

494. 540

Double Thirteen, The, 67
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan,
V, 20, 21. 46, 47, 59, 64,
67, 68, 73, 82, 86, 92, 93,
146-157, 173, 181, 226,
233, 240, 288, 330, 354,
377 ^ 378, 381,392^417^
456, 461, 474, 479, 486,
500, 519, 521,522
Dracula, 38

Dream Detective, The, 78
Dream Doctor, The, 49
Dreamers: A Club, The,

485

Dred, Michael, 470
Drink to Yesterday, 500
Drummond, Bulldog, 401
Du Bois, Theodora, 494
Du Boisgobey, 21, 45, 46,
86, 458, 459, 57a
Dubourg, Pauline, 173
Duke, Winifred, 501
Duke of York*$ Steps, The,
495

Dulcet, Dove, 483

Dumas, Alexandre, 44, 85,

Du Maurier, Daphne, 290,

494. 530

Dunlap, Constance, 53, 482
Dunsany, Lord, 447, 479
Dupin, Andr^ Marie Jean
Jacques, 174

Dupin, C. Auguste, 17, 20,
22, 28, 29, 41, 44, 55, 66,
76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 85,
90> 93» 94» 108, 164, i68,
172, 174, 175, 177, 377,
406, 462, 528
Dupin, Francois Charles
Pierre, 174

Dyke Darrel the Railroad
Detective, 459

Eagrave Square Mystery,
The, 60, 471

Eames-Erskine Case, The,
60

East and West, 504
East Lynne, 86
Eberhart, Mignon, 110,
182, 37 L 48 l 501
Edaiji, George, 82
Edginton, May, 484
Education of Mr. P. J.

Davenant, The, 65
Egyptian Cross Mystery,
The, 434

Eight Strokes of the Clock,
The, 503
Si}, 504
Electra, 529
Eliot, T. S., 458, 500
Elizabeth Is Missing, 500
Elk, Inspector, 446
EUerby Case, The, 49
Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine, 497, 406-414,

541

“Elusive Bullet, The,” 478
Elusive Picaroon, The, 484
Elvestad, Sven, 64
Emperor*s Old Clothes,
The, 64

Enchanted Type-Writer,
The, 485

Englishman of the Rue
Cain, The, 469
Enquiry Into the Nature
of Certain Nineteenth

Century Pamphlets, An,
453

Enter Three 5^4

Envious Casca, 502
Epitaph for a Spy, 260
Erinnerunngen eines
CriminahPolizisten von
Waters, 467

Erzdhlungen eines Ge-
richtzartes, 64
Escape, 388, 493
Essays in Satire, 456
Estabrook, Robert, 55
Etranges Noces de Route-
tabille, 62

Eustace, Robert, 96, 413,
506

“Evening Primrose,” 253
Experiences of a Barrister,
The, 468

Experiences of a French
Detective Officer, 467
Experiences of a Real De-
tective, 468

Experiment Perilous, 302,
499

Exploits of Arsene Lupin,
The, 486

Exploits of Elaine, The,
138

Exploits of Fidelity Dove,
The, 485

Expressman and the De-
tective, The, 459
Eye of Osiris, The, 61, 463,

501

Eyes of Max Carrados,
The, 463, 499

Face and the Mask, The,

485

Face Is Familiar, The, 319
Fair, A. A., 540

Fair-Haired Lady, The,
473

Fair Warning, 501
Faked Passports, 389
Falcon, Gay, 408
Falcon, The, 305
Falkner, John Meade, 501
“Fall of the House of
Usher, The,” 38, 160
Fallen Sparrow, The, 493,

503

Index

“False Burton Combs,”
203

Famous Trials of the
Nineteenth Century, 91
Farewell, My Lovely, 222,

302, 395. 492

Farjeon, B. L., 470
Fast, Julius, 253
Fast Company, 505
Fatal Five Minutes, The,
495

Father Brown Omnibus,
The, 499

Fear and Miss Betony, 499
Fearing, Kenneth, 235
Feinen Zigarren, Die, 67
Fell, Dr. Gideon, 273-286,
371, 403, 408, 478, 493,
499

Fellowship of the Frog,
The, 444

Female Detective, The,

468

Female of the Species,
The, 497

Fenisong, Ruth, 537
Fenn, Manvilie, 96
Fer de Lance, 493
Ferguson, J. A., 65
Ferguson, W. Humer, 460
Ferrars, E. X., 538
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 75
Fidler, Henry J„ 413
Field, Inspector, 44
Fielding, A., 60, 61
File 113, 459
Filigree Ball, The, 46, 459
“Final Problem, The,” 314
Find the Clock, 55
Fischer, Bruno, 538
Fisher, Home, 482
“5A King's Bench Walk,”
501

“Five Orange Pips, The,”

317

Five Red Herrings, The,
209

$^000 Reward, 459
Flambeau, 28
Flemish Shop, The, 506
Fletcher, J. S., 55, 60, 61,
142, 437, 439, 482, 50U

519

Floating Admiral, The,
495

553

Flowers for the Judge, 393,

498. 519

“Footfalls,” 483
Footner, Hulbert, 481, 540
“Footprints in the Jun-
gle,” 483

Footsteps at the Lock, 138
Footsteps Behind Her,

507

Footsteps That Stopped,
The, 60, 61

Forgat Colonel, Le, 46, 458
Ford, Leslie, 110, 501
Forester, C. S., 501
Forman, Henry James, 54
Forrester, Andrew, Jr., 407,
468, 487

Forster, E. M., 101, 109
Forsyth, Gideon, 21, 23
Fort Minster, M,P,, A
Westminster Mystery,

469

Fortune, Reginald, 23, 28,
4L 5L 369* 409* 413*
442, 443. 463, 479, 481,

525

Fosco, Count, 89
Four Just Men, The, 31,
32 » 455

Four Square Jane, 485
Four Tragedies of Mem-
worth, 195

Fourteen Great Detective
Stories, 498

Fox-Davies, A. C., 471, 484
Frangois the Valet, 471
Frank case, 502
Frank Pinkerton Detective
Series, The, 459
Frankish, H., 482
Franklin, Jay, 453
Freeman, Mary E. Wil-
kins, 489

Freeman, R. Austin, 7-17,
22, 27, 48, 49, 61, 67, 68,
103, 108, 195, 354, 432,
462, 463, 479, 501, 541
French, Inspector Joseph,
7B, 117, 369, 464
French Key, The, 502
Frich, Oevre Richter, 64
From Natural Causes, 498
“From Poe to Hammett; a
Foundation List of De-
tective Fiction,” 496

554

Index

Frome, David, 478, 501
Fronded Isle and Other
Essays, A, 352
Full Crash Dive, 495
Fuller, Timothy, 493, 501
Fuller, William O., 486
Funeral in Eden, A, 504
“Funeral Pyre, The,” 67
Furneaux, Inspector C. F.,

41^54. 462

Futrelle, Jacques, 50, 281,
471, 481, 505

G , Prefect, 175

G String Murders, The,

504

Gaboriau, £mile, 21, 22,
45* 46* 47* 59* 64, 86, 93,
163, 356, 457, 458, 459,
464, 472, 477, 501
Gale, Gabriel, 482
Gardner, Erie Stanley, vi,
179, 182, 203-207, 208,
268, 304, 417, 478, 501,
502

“Garnet Ring, The,” 407
Garnett Bell, Detective,
482

Gaslight, 302

Gaudy Night, 208-221, 369,
506

Gauntlet of Alceste, 88
Gentleman Who Van-
ished, The, 460
Gesta Romanorum, 43
Gethryn, Anthony, 56, 504
Ghost-Breakers, The, 302
Gilbert, Anthony, 248, 502
Gillette, William, 495
Gillingham, Antony, 23,
56, 78, 98, 103, 229
“Gioconda Smile, The,”
106, 483

Give Me Death, 435
Glass Key, The, 236, 417
Glass Mask, 505
Gloved Hand, The, 58, 68
Goblin Market, The, 504
Godahl, Infallible, 484,
493

“Gold-Bug, The,” 36, 43,
47, 55, 82, 83, 96, 164,
240* 457 * 505

Golden Slipper, The, 53,
79

Golden Tress, The, 459
Good Night, Sheriff, 507,

513

Goodfellow, 82, 280
Goodwin, Archie, 311, 507
Gore, Colonel Wickham,
52, 104, 105, 112, 117,
127

Gorell, Lord, 30, 79, 98
Graeme, Bruce, 484
Grafton, C. W., 494, 537
Grand Babylon Hotel,
The, 58, 462, 498
Grand Duke*s Finances,
The, 64

Graves, Robert, 233
Gray Seal, The, 484
Great American Detective
Stories, 497

“Great Cipher, The,” 55
Great Detective Stories,
The, 33, 98, 456, 497
Great Impersonation, The,

505

“Great Pegram Mystery,
The,” 485

Great Portrait Mystery,
The, 463

Great Short Stories of De-
tection, Mystery, and
Horror, 71, 455, 456
Gredins, Les, 46
Green, Anna Katharine,
21,46,47, 53, 79, 92, 279,
372, 459, 482, 502
Green, Charles M., 204
Green Archer, The, 138
Green Jacket, The, 53
Green Motor Car, The, 63
Greene, Graham, 261-263,
387* 395* 493* 502, 539
Greene, Ward, 502
Greene Murder Case, The,
111, 434, 440
Greenmantle, 56, 65
Gregson, Tobias, 148, 446
Grey, A. F., 502
Grey Room, The, 57, 464,
495

Griffiths, Major Arthur,
458, 466, 470, 471, 487
Grim Grow the Lilacs, 264
Grimm Brothers, 74
Grindle Nightmare, The,

505

Groller, Balduin, 63, 67
Groote Park Murder, The,
59

Gruber, Frank, 502, 537
Griine Auto, Das, 63
Gryce, Ebenezer, 46, 372
Guedalla, Philip, 109, 454
“Guest in the House,
The,” 478
Guilt, 54
Guilty Gold, 471
Guinguette d Deux Sous,
La, 506

Guinguette by the Seine,
The, 506

Guymon, E. T. (Ned), 487

H.M. {see also Merrivale),
371,427, 428,433
Hailey, Dr. Eustace, 54
Haines, Helen E., 498, 500,
501

Halcomber, Marion, 89
Halfway House, 431
Halifax, Clifford, 96, 462
Halladay Case, The, 58
Halliday, Brett, 494
Hambledon, Tommy, 371
Hamilton, Lord Ernest,

195

Hamilton, Lord Frederic,
65, 481, 488

Hamilton, Patrick, 257,

538

Hamlet, 529
Hamlet, Revenge!, 431,
503

“Hammer of dod. The,”
73

Hammett, Dashiell, 182,
203, 204, 205, 233, 234,
235* 236, 246, 289, 302,
304* 370* 378* 379 * 382*
383* 395 * 408, 4 i 7 ’ 4 « 2 ,
465, 478, 479, 480, 489,
492, 502, 507, 519, 530,
537 * 538* 539

Hampstead Mystery, The,
79

Hanaud, 22, 23, 28, 30, 41,
52, 77, 444, 446, 463, 478
Hand and Ring, 46, 459
Hand in the Dark, The,
78

Index

“Hands of Mr. Ottermole,
The,” 281

Hangover Square, 257
Hannasyde, Superintend-
ent, 426’

Hannay, Richard, 41, 56,

Hanshew, T. W., 471, 481
Hanvey, Jim, 54, 484
Hardt, Michael, 249, 388
Hardy, Thomas, 483
Hare, Cyril, 502, 538
Harrington, H., 489
Hart, Frances Noyes, 466,
502, 519

Harte, Bret, 485
Harvard Has a Homicide,
493

Harvey, Marion, 59
Hastings, Captain Arthur,
22, 77

Hastings, Jefferson, 54
Hauptmann case, 523
Have His Carcase, 431, 506
Haworth, Peter, 497
Hawthorne, Julian, 460
Hawthorne, Nathaniel,

483

Hay, James, Jr., 54, 69
Haycraft, Howard, 158-
177, 226, 256, 385, 388,
398s 399* 400* 401, 402*
403, 489, 496, 536-542
Hays, H. R., 178, 537, 541
Hayward, W. S., 468
Hazell, Thorpe, 482
He Arrived at Dusk, 494,

498

He Fell Down Dead, 494
Head, Matthew, 387, 502,

538

Heard, H. F., 502, 538
Heartman, Charles, 472
Heath, Sergeant, 446
Hecht, Ben, 339-342, 483
Heddon, 106
Heller, Frank, 64, 484
Henderson, Donald, 235,
538

Henderson, William, 468,
487

Hendryx, James B., 414
Henry, O., 486
Her Grace at Bay, 471
Hercules, 73

Here Are My Lectures and
Stories, 327

Hemcastle, Colonel, 45
Herodotus, 19, 42, 43, 72,
i6i. 457

Herr des Todes, Der, 63
Hewitt, Martin, 22, 25, 41,
48, 77, 96, 413, 462, 472,

479

Hext, Harrington, 57, 61,
464

Heyer, Georgette, 426,
432* 493* 502
Heyer, Hank, 507
Hide in the Dark, 519
High Window, The, 492
Hill, Headon, 471, 482,
488

Hilliard, A. R., 495, 537
Hilton, James, 502
“His Last Bow,” 488
Histiaios, 43
Hitchcock, Alfred, 246,
248, 289, 300, 301, 395,

507

Hocking, Anne, 495, 538
Hodge, Alan, 233
Holding, Elisabeth San-
xay, 248, 259, 369, 502
Hollow Man, The, 273
Holmes, Gordon, 462
Holmes, H. H., 245, 448,

450, 503

Holmes, Mycroft, 154,

315

Holmes, Raffles, 485
Holmes, Sherlock, 5, 19,
20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 29,
30, 31, 41, 42, 47, 48, 52,
53* 55* 59* 61, 63, 64, 65,
66, 72, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80,
84* 85, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95,
96, 97, 101, 108, 116, 129,
132, 135, 145, 146-157*
179, 210, 226, 240, 267,

278, 287, 288, 292, 301,

311-318, 330, 356, 366,
369* 371* 377* 378* 390*

392, 400, 404, 412, 413,

442, 456, 458, 460, 461,

462, 463, 466, 469, 472,

479, 480, 481, 485, 486,

488, 522, 524, 530
“Holmes and the Dasher,”
486

555

“Holmlock Shears Arrives
Too Late,” 486
Holton, Nathaniel, 48
Home Sweet Homicide,
238, 307, 368, 506
Homes, Geoffrey, 503
Homme sans Nom, V, 458
Honorable Algernon
Knox, Detective, The,

57. 483

Hopkins, Inspector Stan-
ley, 148, 155

Hopkins, Stanley, Jr,, 537
Hornung, E, W., 66, 455,

471, 484* 503

Hound of the Baskervilles,
The, 67, 149, 314, 371
House by the Churchyard,
The, 88

House of the Arrow, The,
52,61, 104,435,444, 463,

504

House of the Whispering
Pines, The, 46, 459
Household, Geoffrey, 503
How to Be a Hermit, 373
How to Become Extinct,
373

How to Tell Your Friends
From the Apes, 373
Howells, William Dean,
176

Hudson, Mrs,, 148, 155
Hughes, Alfred, 407, 487
Hughes, Dorothy B., 259,

303. 387. 493- 503. 537.
538. 539

Hughes, Rupert, 484
Huit Coups de VHorloge,
Les, 62, 503

Hull, Richard, 257, 503
Humblethome, Inspector,

Hume, Fergus W., 46, 460,

Hurst, Norman, 470
Huxley, Aldous, 106, 483
Huxley, Elspeth, 503

Idiot, The, 430
lies, Francis, 257, 300, 402,
405. 501, 503, 537, 538
“In a Cellar,” 407
In der Dunkerkammer, 63
In Secret, 482

Index

556

In the Night, 30, 79, 98
Incredible Adventures of
Rowland Hern, The,

490

Influence of Edgar Allan
Poe in France, The, 167
Initials Only, 279
Innes, Michael, 246, 247,
39i»403»43i»503»5i9
Innocence of Father
Brown, The, 73, 82, 107,

463

Innocent Mrs. Duff, The,
369

Inquest, 235, 507, 519
Inspector French and the
Cheyne Mystery, 132
Inspector French and the
Starvel Tragedy, 464
Inspector French* s Great-
est Case, 59
Intrigue, 498
Invasion, The, 65
Investigations of John
Pym, The, 470, 482
“Invisible Man, The," 82
Irish, William, 248, 260,
$ 0 $, 507. 537

Irish Police Officer, The,
468

Iron Gates, The, 255, 258,
369^ 495

Is He the Man?, 458
Ivanhoe, 38

Ivory Queen, The, 470

Jack-the>Ripper, 58
Jacobs, W. W., 483
James, Henry, 38, 494
James, M. R., 252
Jardine, Dr, Humphrey,
77

Jarrett, Cora, 503
Jenkins, Ed, 205
Jenkins, Herbert H., 54,
481

Jennings, Ezra, 380
Jepson, Selwyn, 503, 538
Jervis, Dr. Christopher, 77
Jesse, E. Tennyson, 91, 484
Jewel Mysteries I Have
Known, 470
Jig-Saw, 57, 68
Jim Cummings, or The

Great Adams Express
Robbery, 459

Jim Hanvey, Detective, 54,
490

John Thorndyke*s Cases,
462

Johnny on the Spot, 386
Johns, Veronica Parker,

503

Johnson, Owen, 483
Johnson, W. Bolingbroke,

503

Jones, Average, 414, 479
Jones, Cholmondeley, 414
Jones, Hemlock, 485
Jones, Shamrock, 486
Journey Into Fear, 262,
492

Judas, Incorporated, 386,
507

Judas Window, The, 493,
500

Judith Lee, 53, 79
Jumping Jenny, 432
Justice Be Damned, 495
Justus, Helene and Jake,
238, 368

Kagey, Rudolf, 507
Kaulbach, J-, 63
Keate, Nurse, 501
Keeler, Harry Stephen, 55,
306, 484

Keene, Faraday, 503
Keep Murder Quiet, 503
Keillahd, Axel, 247
Keith, David, 247, 494, 537
Kelley, Martha Mott, 505
Keltiber, Diego, 247
Kendrick, Baynard, 495
Kennedy, Craig, 49, 68,

409* 4 ^ 5 » 482^ 490

Kent, Constance, go, 455
Kessel, Joseph, 247
Keverne, Richard, 494
Kimball, Miles W., 436
King, C. Daly, 491
King, Rufus, 503
Kink, The, 499
Kipling, Rudyard, 109,

484

Kirk, Ashton, 59
Kitchin, C. H. B., 495
Klaw, Moris, 78

Knife Behind the Curtain,
The, 488

Knox, Ronald A., 23, 58,
61, 67, 95, 107, 108, 109,
138, 146, 194-196, 288,

354. 456. 457- 465- 479.

489, 503

Kohlrausch, R., 63
Kombs, Sherlaw, 485
Krag, Asbjorn, 64
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 164,
178-185, 391, 394, 541
Kurnitz, Harry, 505
Kutak, Rosemary, 495, 538
Kynnersley, Sir John, 484

Ladies in Retirement, 302
Lady From Nowhere, T he,
461

Lady in the Lake, The,
302

Lady in the Morgue, The,

503

Lady Killer, 502
Lady Molly of Scotland
Yard, 53. 79 » 47 1
Lady of the Barge, The,

483

Lady Vanishes, The, 507
Lament for a Maker, 503
Landon, Herman, 484
Landru, Henri, 448, 450
Lang, Sophie, 493
Lange Wunder, Das, 63
Larsan, Fr4d^ric, 355
Last Doorbell, The, 502
Last of the Mohicans, T he,
85

Late Tenant, The, 462
Latham, Mrs. Grace, 368,
501

Latimer, Jonathan, 387,

503

Laura, 301, 371, 495, 540
Laurels Are Poison, 505
Law and the Lady, The,

79 ^ 471

Lawrence, Hilda, 493, 503,

538

Layton Court Mystery,
The, 106, 465
Lazarus #7, 235, 506
Leacock, Stephen, 327-337,
486

Leatherstocking, 490

Index

557

Leavenworth Case:, The,
46, 92, S72, 472» 502
Leaves From the Note-
Book of a Chief of Po-
lice, 487

Leaves From the Note-
Book of a New York De-
tective, 407

Leblanc, Maurice, 62, 66,

67* 399 » 458, 465* m *

484, 485, 486, 503, 541
Lecoq, 41, 45, 48, 55, 62,
66

Lee, Gypsy Rose, 504
Lee, Jeanette, 53
Lee, Judith, 53
Lee, Manfred B., 406, 497
Le Fanu, Sheridan, 86, 88,
89, 95, 209, 253
Lees, Hannah, 504
Lehmann, R. C., 486
Leighton, Marie Connor,
470

Leighton, Robert, 470
Leith, Gwynn, 479
Leonard, Charles L., 247
Le Queux, William, 65,
83, 246, 414, 482, 488,
539

Lermina, Jules, 458
Leroux, Gaston, 38, 55, 62,
69, 78, 107, 278, 355, 458,
485» 473» 504
Lestrade, Inspector, 148
Let Him Die, 493
Letter, The, 302
Lincoln, Abraham, 176,

177

Lindsay, M., 407
Link by Link, 470
Links in the Chain, 471
Listening House, The, 506
“Literature of Crime De-
tection, The,” 2
Literature of Roguery,
The, 2

“Little House, The,” 442
Livingston, Kenneth, 491
“Locked Room, The,” 478
Lockridge, Frances and
Richard, 493, 504, 537,

538

Lockridge, Richard, 247
Lodger, The, 58, 301, 504,

530

Lomas, Stanley, 51
London Adventures of
Mr. Collin, The, 64
London Nights of Belsize,
The, 29, 457
Lone Inn, The, 461
Lone Wolf, 66
Long, Gabrielle Margaret
Vere Campbell, 506
Long Arm & Other Detec-
tive Stories, The, 489
Long Week-End, 233
Longbow Murder, The,
495

Lome, Uncle, 87
Look Your Last, ^7
Lorac, E. C. R., 504
“Losing of Jasper Virel,
The,” 88

Lost Naval Papers, The,
56, 65, 488

Lowndes, Mrs. Belloc, 58,
106, 504, 530
Lubbock, Percy, 98
Lucas, E, V., 352-354
Luhrs, Victor, 495
Lupin, Arsine, 41, 62, 66,
356. 358. 399. 4 ‘». 409.
473. 484. 486, 503, 504.

541

“Lynch, Judge,” vi, 367-

372

Lynch, Lawrence L., 459
Lynde, Francis, 490

Maartens, Maarten, 461
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive,

175

McAllister, Alister, 499
Macardle, Dorothy, 371,
494

MacCarthy, Desmond, 454
McCarthy, Mary, 178, 541
McCarty, Inspector Timo-
thy, 102

McCloy, Helen, 247, 504
McCue, Lillian de la
Torre Bueno, 500
MacDonald, Philip, 56,

68 , 43 ». 433, 435 > 465,
504

McFarland, Arthur E., 58,
59* 68

McGovan, James, 468, 487
Macgowan, Kenneth, 497

McGuire, Paul, 504
MacHarg, William, 490,

498

Macinnes, Helen, 246, 389,

493

McIntyre, John T., 59, 465
McKaye, Randle, 132
McKelvie, Graydon, 59
“Mackenzie Case, The,”

479. 480

McLevy, James, 487
MacTavish, Alonzo, 484
Madam Growl's Ghost, 253
“Maddened by Mystery:
or. The Defective Detec-
tive,” 486

Madeline Payne, 460
“Maelzel's Chess-Player,”
36, 165

Maigret, Inspector, 404,

538

Maigret Keeps a Rendez-
vous, 506

Maigret to the Rescue, 506
Main Froide, La, 46
Mainwaring, Daniel, 503
Malachite Jar, The, 482
Malcolm Sage, Detective,

54.481

Malice Aforethought, 501
Malleson, Lucy Beatrice,
502

Mallison Mystery, The,

471

Malone, John J., 238, 360
Maltese Falcon, The, 203,
204, 235, 236, 302, 370,
379» 417

“Man Called Spade, A,”
480

Man from Manchester,
The, 470

Man From Scotland Yard,
The, 501

Man From Tibet, The,

499

Man-Hunter, The, 470
Man in Lower Ten, The,
120

Man in the Jury-Box, The,
107

“Man in the Passage,
The,” 281

Man in the Red Hat, The,

494

Index

558

Man of the Forty Faces,
The, 280, 471
Man Who Sam Through
Heaven, The, 483
“Man With the Twisted
Lip, The,” 317
Mandelstamm, Valentin,

247

Manning, Adelaide, 500
Marathon Mystery, The,

March, Colonel, 479
Marchmont, Arthur W.,
60, 471

Margate Murder Mystery,
The, 471

Markham, District Attor-
ney John F.-X., 383
Markham, Virgil, 495
Marlowe, Philip, 222
Marple, Jane, 368
Marsh, Ngaio, 110, 247,
391. 392, 393» 403* 504.
522

Marsh, Richard, 53, 79,
470, 494

Martel, Charles, 407, 460,
470, 487

Martin, A. E., 538
Martin, John Bartlow,

379

Martin, Wyndham, 66
Martin Hewitt, Investiga-
tor, 462, 505

Mason, A. E. W., 22, 23,
37» 61, 104, 109,

144» 435. 444> 463» 478,

504

Mason, Perry, 203, 304,
478, 502

Mason, Van Wyck, 246
Massie, Chris, 538
Master Hand, The, 471
Masterman, Walter S., 68,

69.457

Masterpieces of Crime,

489

Masterpieces of Mystery,
482

Masters of Mystery: A
Study of the Detective
Story, 128, 456
Matthews, Brander, 489
Matter of Iodine, A, 494
Maugham, W. Somerset,

tog, 178, 247, 261, 391,
394» 483* 488, 504, 541
Mauleverer Murders, The,

471

Max Carrados, 463, 499
Max Carrados Mysteries,

483

Maybrick case, 106
Meade, L. T., 95, 96, 413,
462

Mealand, Richard, vi, 298-

303

Meet Mr, Fortune, 498
Meissner, P., 63
Melrose^ Mystery, The, 54
Memling, Dirk, 484
Mdmoires de Vidocq, 487
MSmoires d*un Policeman,

487

Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes, The, 410, 454,

472

Merely Murder, 493
Merlini, 506

Merrivale, Sir Henry {see
also H.M.), 427, 493, 500
Messac, R^is, 128
Meudon Mystery, The,

458

Meyerstein, E. H. W., ro6
Michael Dred, Detective,
470

Middle Temple Murder,
The, 55, 61, 501, 518, 519
Midnight and Percy Jones,

507

Midnight Mystery, A, 461
Millar, Kenneth, 247
Millar, Margaret, 255, 257,
258,859,369,495, 537
Millionaire Girl, A, 471
Milne, A. A., 23, 56, 61, 78,
98, 103, 109, 116, 195,
226-229, 464, 504
Minotaur, 43

“Mirror of the Magistrate,
The,” 107

Misadventures of Sherlock
Holmes, The, 412, 486,
497

Misirahles, Les, 512
Miss Bracegirdle and
Others, 483

“Miss Brac^rdle Does
Her Duty,” 483

“Mr. Bearstowe Says,” 478
Mr, Bowling Buys a News-
paper, 235

Mr. Collin Is Ruined, 64
Mr. Fortune, Please, 69
Mr. Fortune*s Practice,

465

Mr. Fortune*s Trials, 463
Mr. Jelly* s Business, 507
Mr. Justice Harhottle, 253
Mr. Pepper, Investigator,

490

“Mr. Pointing’s Alibi,” 68
Mr. Pottermack*s Over-
sight, 432, 501
Mr. Standfast, 56
Mrs. Waldegrave*s Will
and Other Tales, 468
Mitchell, Gladys, 504, 505
“Moabite Cipher, The,”

Model T own and the De-
tectives, The, 459
Molly, Lady, 53
Momentary Stoppage, 502
Monsieur Dupin, 505
Monsieur Jonquelle, 55
Monsieur Lecoq, 45, 47,
458, 501

Monster, The, 57
Moonstone, The, 21, 44,
89, 90, 92, 101, 104, 105,
3782 379-380, 4552 458,
467, 472, 500
Moorhouse, Hopkins, 88
Moran, Sebastian, 315
Moriarty, Professor James,
26, 27, 29, 151, 157* 315*
358

Morley, Christopher, 146,

483

Morrison, Arthur, 22, 48,
67, 96, 461, 479, 505
Mortal Coils, 106, 483
Mortimer, Raymond, 507
Moser, Inspector Maurice,
468, 487
Moto, Mr., 541
Muddock, Joyce Emmer-
son, 470, 481

Mudgett, Herman Web-
ster, 448
“Murder,” 483
Murder and Its Motives,

Index

Murder at Government
House, 563

Murder at Smutty Nose,
440

Murder Hook of /. G.

Reeder, The, 495
Murder by Marriage, 494
Murder Chop Chop, 495
Murder Down Under, 507
Murder for Pleasure: The
Life and Times of the
Detective Story, v, 158,
226, 385,398,496
Murder in a Walled
Town, 494

Murder in Any Degree,

483

Murder in Hospital, 498
Murder in Retrospect,

499

Murder in Trinidad, 507
Murder Is a Collectors
Item, 494

Murder Must Advertise,
209

Murder, My Sweet, 540
Murder of My Aunt, The,

503

Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
The, 51, 69, 98, 107, 110,
111, 356^ 384* 435 * 499 *

518

Murder of Sir Edmund
Godrey, The, 499
Murder on Safari, 503
Murder on the Links, The,

Murder on the Orient Ex^
press, 433

Murder Out of Turn, 504
Murders in Praed Street,
506

“Murders in the Rue
Morgue, The,*' 17, 36, 43,
48, 67, 72, 80, 81, 93, 96,
158, 160, 164, 165, 166-
168, 173, 175, 891, 377.
457. 477. 505. S* 7 . 5*8
Murders in Volume st, 500
Murray, David Christie,
470, 482

“Musgrave Ritual, The,“
94

Myers, Isobel Briggs, 435
Myrl, Dora» 471

MysUre de la Chamhre
Jaune, Le, 62, 107, 355
Mysteres du Nouveau
Paris, Les, 46
Mysteries of a Great City,
482

Mysteries of Police and
Crime, 466, 487
Mysteries of Udolpho,
The, 259

Mysterious Affair at Styles,
The, 51, 428, 430, 464
Mysterious Chinaman,
The, 142

Mysterious Disappear-
ance, A, 462

Mysterious Mickey Finn,
493

Mystery Fiction: Theory if
Technique, vi, 264, 385
Mystery in the Woodshed,
502

Mystery of a Hansom Cab,
The, 46, 47, 460, 472
Mystery of a Wheel-
Barrow, or Gaboriau
Gaborooed, 460
Mystery of Angelina
Frood, The, 501
Mystery of Beaton Craig,
The, 60

Mystery of Edwin Drood,
The, 13,21,44, 101, 143,
458, 500

Mystery of Jamaica Ter-
race, The, 470
“Mystery of Marie Rog^t,
The," 25, 28, 36, 43, 48,
82, 83, 84, 96, 121, 164,
165, 168, 169, 172, 173,

377 * 455 * 457 * m
Mystery of Orcival, The,

459

Mystery of the Blue Train,
The, 441

Mystery of the Boule
Cabinet, The, 58
Mystery of the Downs,
The, 79

“Mystery of the Fabulous
Laundryman, The,” 483
Mystery of the Green Ray,
The, 65

Mystery of the Hidden
Room, The, 59

559

“Mystery of the Missing
Wash, The,” 480
Mystery of the Yellow
Room, The, 38, 62, 69,

*78. 473. 504

Mystery of 5/ New Inn,
The, 463

Mystery Theater, 307
Mystery Writers of Amer-
ica, Inc., 197, 245, 304,

541

Nameless Thing, The, 481
Nash, Ogden, 319-320, 339,
378, 501, 507
“Naval Treaty, The,” 94
Neal, Adeline Phyllis, 502
Nebuly Coat, The, 501
Nelms, Henning, 507
New, Clarence Herbert,

65. 488

New Paths in Book-Col-
lecting, 453

Newberry, Millicent, 53
Newton, Anthony, 484
Nicholas Goad, Detective,

57. 483

Nicolson, Marjorie, 110-
127

Night Must Fall, 301
Night Over Fitch*s Pond,
503

Night Visitor, The, 483
Night With Sherlock
Holmes, A, 486
Nine Holiday Adventures
of Mr, P, J, Davenant,

Nine Tailors, The, 210,
391. 39 *. 393. 506, 5»9
No Clue!, 54
No Friendly Drop, 428
No Name, 79, 89, 91, 471
No Orchids for Miss
Blandish, 506
No Other Tiger, 104
None So Blind, 249
Nonsense Novels, 486
Noose, The, 435
Norman, James, 495
Norroy, Yorke, 488
Norroy, Diplomatic Agent,
488

North, Harry, 204, 205

inaex

560

North, Mr. and Mrs., 368,
504

Norths Meet Murder^ The,

Not Sufficient Evidence,

106

Notorious Sophie Lang,
The, 485

November Joe, 490
Number S7, 57

Obstinate Murderer, The,

502

Odor of Violets, The, 495
Offord, Lenore Glen, 259,

505

O’Higgins, Harvey J., 481,

490

Old Age of Lecoq, The,

458

“Old Cap Collier,” 365
Old Man in the Corner,
78, 410, 490

Old Man in the Corner,
The^ 54, 84, 463, 481
**01d Sleuth,** 365, 407
Old Testament, 19, 42,

472. 528

Olde, Nicholas, 490
Olivieri, 64

Olmstead case, 444-446
Omnibus of Crime, The,
71, 231, 497

*‘On Murder Considered
as One of the Fine Arts,’*
52S

Once Off Guard, 494
*^One Hundred in the
Bark,” 483

xoi Years* Entertainment:
The Great Detective
Stories, XS41-XP4X, 476,
478, 484, 4872 490, 497
Oppenheim, E. Phillips,
57,65, 246, 395^482, 4832
484, 488, 489, 505, 539
Orator, The, 490
Orciy, Baroness, 53, 54, 67,
782 792 84, 4832 47^
Orphan Ann, 498
Orwell, George, 178, 541
Osborn, E. A., 457, 460
Osbourne, Lloyd, 461, 507
Ostrander, Isabel, 102, 465

Ottolengui, 64
Out of This World, 253
Overture to Death, 392-
3932 504

Oxenham, John, 96

Packard, Frank L., 484
Paddington Mystery, The,
49

Page, Marco, 505
Pain, Barry, 32, 66, 484
Painted for the Kill, 500
Palmer, John Leslie, 498
Palmer, Stuart, 408, 412,
4132 486, 505

Parfum de la Dame en
Noir, La, 62
Parks, Eddie, 481
Parmelee, Bill, 491
Partridge, Ralph, 505
Passenger From Scotland
Yard, The, 469
Pathfinder, The, 85
Patient in Room 18, 501
Patten, William, 489
Patrick, Q., 505
Patriotic Murders, The,

249

Pattern in Black and Red,

503

Paul, Elliot, 493, 537, 541
Paul Beck, the Rule of
Thumb Detective, 471
Paul Richards, Detective,
482

Payment Deferred, 501
Pearson, Edmund, 440
^Peekaboo Pennington,
Private Eye,** 379
Pemberton, Max, 470
Penguin Pool Murder,
The, 412

Pentecost, Hugh, 386, 494,
537

Perdue, Virginia, 494, 537,
541

Perfume of the Lady in
Black, The, 38, 62
Perhaps a Little Danger,
500

Peril at End House, 430
Peter Rough, 57
Peterson, Carl, 133
Peyrou, Manuel, 247
Phantom Clue, The, 62

“Phantom Crook,” 205
Phantom Lady, 260, 507,

540

Phantom of the Opera,
The, 38

Phelps, William Lyon, 204
Phillpotts, Eden, 57, 61, 68,
109, 464, 49S
Philmore, R., 423-435
Philo Vance Murder
Cases, 189

Piccadilly Puzzle, The,

460

Picture of Dorian Gray,
The, 447

“Pink Edge, The,*' 479
Pinkerton, Alan, 459, 487
Pinkerton, Evan, 478, 501,

525

Piper, Inspector Oscar, 412

Pirkis, C. L., 481

Pit Prop Syndicate, The,

484

Plague Court Murders,
The, 433, 493
Platanen-Allee Nr» 14, 63
Pleydell, George, 60
Poate, Ernest M., 52, 68
Poe, Edgar Allan, v, 1, 17,
20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 36, 38,
432 442 452 46, 472 552 842
87» 72, 73, 76, 77, 80, 81,
82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 92,
932 95* 982 101, 118, 158-
177, 181, 240, 280, 291,
3562 385* 3772 408, 4072
408, 413, 455, 457, 4582
461, 467, 472, 474, 477.
4792 480, 505, 517, 521,
522, 527, 528, 530, 535
“Poe and the Mystery of
Mary Rogers,” 169
Poggioli, Henry, 479
Poirot, Hercule, 22, 23, 30,
5I2 89, 77, 78, 117, 126,
1452 230, 400, 410, 411,
4332 44L 4482 4792 4992

525

Poirot Investigates, 51
Poisoned Chocolates Case,
The, 197, 498
Poisoned Pen, The, 49
Police at the Funeral, 498
“Policeman's Cape,” 478
Policeman*s Lot, 491

Index

Pollard, Graham, 453
Pond, Mr., *482
Pons, Solar, 486
Ponson Case, The, 26, 59,

464

Poole, Inspector John,

428, 491

Portcullis Room, The, 495
Post, Melville Davisson,

55, 96, 281,465, 479, 481,
488, 505, 507
Postgate, Raymond, 235,

489^ 505* 538

Postman Always Rings
Twice, The, 494
Potted Fiction, 485
Power House, The, 27, 144
Prescott, Harriet, 407
Prichard, Hesketh, 490
Pricking Thumb, The, 499
Priestley, Dr., 49, 51, 369,
404, 478

Priestley, J. B., 116
Primrose, Colonel John
T., 368

Prince, Napoleon, 484
Prince Zaleski, 83
Prisoner in the Opal, The,

463

Private Life of Sherlock
Holmes, The, 147, 456,

Private Report, 249
Problem of Cell 1^, The,
50, 281, 505
Professor on the Case,
The, 471

Profile of a Murder, 503
Prose Romances of Edgar
A. Poe, The, 167
‘‘Proverbial Murder,

The," 478

“Purloined Letter, The,"
36, 43, 48, 8i, 94, 108,
164, 165, 169-173, 174,
176. 365> 377» 457» 469^

505

Pursuit of the House-
Boat, The, 485
Puzzle for Fools, A, 494
Puzzle of the Blue Ban-
derilla. The, 505
Pym, John, 470

Queen, Ellery, vi, 179, 182,

247, 284, 406-414, 431,
432, 434, 465, 476-49L
497* 499* 501* 502, 504*

505* 525

Queen Anne's Gate Mys-
tery, The, 470
Quentin, Patrick, 492, 494,

505

Question of Proof, A, 432
Quests, The, 471

R. Holmes & Co,, 485
Raffles, 19, 31, 32, 64, 66,
67, 77. 421.455,471,484,

485. 503

Raffles, Mrs., 485 *
Randall, David, 379
Randolph, Marion, 264,
537

“Ransom," 480

Rasp, The, 68, 434, 465,

504

Rater, O., 490
Ratselhafte Feind, Der, 64
Rawson, Clayton, 506
Rebecca, 290, 301, 494, 530,
540

Recollections of a Detec-
tive Police Officer, 467,

487

Records of Vincent Trill,
The, 470

Red Box, The, 396
Red Castle Mystery, The,
493

Red Harvest, 203, 204, 370
“Red-Headed League,
The," 316, 317
Red House Mystery, The,
56, 61, 98, 195, 226-229,
464, 504

Red Redmaynes, The, 57,
61, 465

Red Thumb Mark, The,
68, 462, 472
Red Triangle, The, 48
Red Widow Murders,
The, 427, 500
Rede, Kenneth, 472
Reed, Sir Edward J., 469
Reeder, J, G., 411, 490
Re-Enter Sir John, 494
Rees, A, J., 78, 79
Reeve, Arthur B., 49, 53,
79, 138, 465, 482, 490

561

“Reigate Puzzle, The,"
150

Rendall, Vernon, 29, 457
“Resurrection of Chin
Lee, The," 480
Return of Sherlock
Holmes, The, 73
Return of the Continental
Op, The, 502
Reunion with Murder, 501
Revelations of a Lady De-
tective, The, 468
Revelations of a Private
Detective, The, 468,

487

Rhampsinitus, 42, 43, 75
Rhode, John, 49, 369, 478,
489* 497* 506, 522
Ricardo, 77

Rice, Craig, vi, 238-244,
307, 368, 408, 504, 506,
537* 538

Richmond, or Scenes in
the Life of a Bow
Street Officer, 466
Rickard, Mrs. Victor, 106
Riddell, Mrs. J. H., 469
Rideal, Charles F., 487
Rim of the Pit, 507
Rinehart, Mary Roberts,

179* 485* 484. 506

Ring and the Book, The,

Rising of the Moon, The,

505

Riverton, Stein, 64
Rivett, Edith Caroline,

504

Roberts, Denys K., 208
Roberts, Katherine, 249,
388, 537

Roberts, S. C., 146, 454
Robin Hood, 5, 31, 75, 295,
401, 402, 411
Rocket to the Morgue,

503

Rodell, Marie F., vi, 264-

272** 385* 388

Roden, H. W., 494, 538 '
Rogers, Joel Townsley,

538

Rogers, Mary Cecilia, 82,
t68, 169

Rogers, Samuel, 495, 538
Rogue Male, 493, 503

Index

562

Rogues* Gallery: The
Great Criminals of Mod-
ern Fiction, 497
Rogues in Clover, 490
Rohmer, Sax, 78, 484, 488
Rolls, Anthony, 495
Rome Express, The, 470
Room Number 482
Room j^, 455
Room With the Tassels,
The, 439

Rope for a Convict, 495
Rope to Spare, 431
Rosenbach, Dr. A. S. W.,
167

Rosner, Karl, 63
Ross, Bamaby, 505
Rottnerhoff, Der, 63
Rouletabille, Joseph, 41,
55. 6 a, 69, 78, 355
Rouletabille chez Krupp,
62

Rouletabille chez le Tsar,
62

Round the Red Lamp, 73
Russell, Thomas, 407
Russell, W. Clark, 458
Russell, William, 467, 487

S.S. Murder, 505
Sabotage, 494
Sage, Malcolm, 54
Sailors* Rendezvous, The,
506

Saint, The {see also
Templar, Simon), 301,
369, 411, 484

Saint-Fiacre Affair, The,
506

Saint Steps In, The, 388,

389

Sale, Richard, 235, 506, 537
Sampson, Richard Henry,
50$

Samuel Boyd of Catchpole
Square, 470

Sanctuary Club, The, 413
Sand, George, 173
Sandoe, James, vx, 250-263,
492-507
“Sapper,” 133
Saunders, Hilary St.

George, 498
Saxton, Mark, 388
Sayers, Dorothy L., 18, 54,

71-109, 110, 137, 166,
179, 181, 182, 208-221,
229, 231, 232, 251, 377,
39>. 39*. 393. 408. 4*3.
4*5. 43». 433. 455. 456.
457. 461, 465. 469. 47>.

479. 489. 497. 506. 519.

537. 538

Sayers, Michael, 484
“Scandal in Bohemia, A,”

173* 317

Scarlet Tanager, The, 65
Schwarze Perlen, 63
Scientific Cracksman, The,
68

Scientific Sprague, 490
Scott, R. T. M., 414, 488
Scott, Sir Walter, 38, 173
Seagrave, Superintendent,

Second Omnibus of Crime,
The, 497

Second Shot, The, 432
Secret of Chimneys, The,
196

Secret of the Barbican,
The, 482

Secret of the Night, The,
38, 62

Secret Service, or Recol-
lections of a City Detec-
tive, 468

Secret Service Smith, 488
Secret Vanguard, The, 246
Seddon case, 106
See You at the Morgue,
267

Seeley, Mabel, 259, 506
Selby, Douglas, 203
Seven of Hearts, The, 473
Shadow of Ashlydyat, The,
86

Shadow of the Rope, The,
471

Shadowed by Three, 460
Shape of Danger, 247
Shattudc, Richard, 387
Shaw, Captain Joseph P.,
204

Shayne, Mike, 369
Shearing, Joseph, 506
Sheringham, Roger, 478
Sherlock Holmes, Fact or
Fiction?, 456

Sherlock Holmes, Raffles,

und Ihre Vorbilder: Ein
Beitrag zur Entwick-
lungsgeschichte und
Technik der Krimina-
lerzahlung, 128
Sherlock Holmes and
Doctor Watson, 456
Shiel, M. P., 83, 462, 479
Shore, Viola Brothers, 479,
480

Shot on the Downs, 4 .>jz
Shrieking Pit, The, 78
“Shylock Holmes: His
Posthumous Memoirs,”

485

Sign of Evil, The, 54
Sign of Four, The, 47, 378,
381, 472, 519
Silent Bullet, The, 49
Silent House, The, 462
Silent Passenger, The, 471
Silent Witness, A, 27, 463
Silver, Maud, 368
“Silver Blaze,” 67
Simenon, Georges, 355,
387, 404, 405, 506, 507,
538

Simon, A. J., 499
Simple Way of Poison,
The, 501

Simpson, Helen, 494, 541
Sims, George R., 53, 79,
471. 481

Singing Bone, The, 108,
462, 501

Singing Widow, The, 503
Sixes and Sevens, 486
Skeleton in Every House,
A, 468

Skeleton Key, 259, 505
Skeleton Key, The, 107,
494

Skin for Skin, 501
Slane*s Long Shots, 483
Slappey, Horian, 484
Slater, Oscar, 82
Slaves of the Lamp, 488
Sleuth of SL James*s
Square, The, 55
“Sleuths, The,” 486
Slype, The, 501
Smell of Money, The, 387,

502

Smiler With the Knife,
The, 246

Index

563

Smith, Anthony, 414
Smith, AurHius, 414, 488
Smith, Black John, 414
Smith, Edgar W., 146, 501
Smith, Ernest Bramah,
499

So Blue Marble^ The, 493
Some Further Adventures
of Mr. P. J. Davenant,
65

Somebody at the Door,
505

Sophocles, 457
Sorceress of the Strand,
The, 96

Spade, Sam, 236, 408, 479
Spain, John, 494
Spanish Cape Mystery,
The, 432

Spargo, Frank, 55
Spearman, Rosanna, 90,
104, 380

Spooky Hollow, 67
Sporting Blood: The
Great Sports Detective
Stories, 497
Spring, Howard, 390
Spuren im Schnee, 64
Stagg, Clinton H., 53
Stagge, Jonathan, 492, 495,
505

Starrett, Vincent, 146-157,
249 » 453 » 456. 486, 489^
497» 498. 500 > 502^

507^ 541 » 542

Stars Spell Death, The,
495

Starvel Hollow Tragedy,
The, 59

Stealthy Terror, The, 65
Steel, Kurt, 386, 507
Steel Safe, The, 459
Steele, Frederic Dorr, 412
Steele, Wilhur Daniel, 483
Steeves, Harrison R., 507,
513-526, 537» 541
Step on the Stair, The, 46,
460

Stem, Philip Van Doren,
166, 527-535, 541
Stevenson, Burton E„ 58,
68

Stevenson, Robert Louis,
5, 21, 23, 77, 108, 461,

484. 507

Stewart, Alfred Walker,
500

Stewart, John Innes Mack-
intosh, 503
Stoat, The, 499
Stoker, Bram, 38
“Stolen Cigar Case, The,”

485

“Stolen White Elephant,
The,” 484
Stone, Fleming, 280
Stone, P. M., 501
Storey, Mme., 481
Stories From Scotland
Yard, 468, 487
Stories From the Diary of
a Doctor, 96, 462
Stout, Rex, 311-318, 396,

403. 478. 493. 507

Strachey, John, 541
Strange, John Stephen,
507

Strange, Violet, 53
Strange Adventures of
Mr. Collin, The, 64
Strange Case of Mr. Henry
Marchmont, The, 437
Strange Death of Manny
Square, The, 500
Strange Disappearance of
Lady Delia, The, 462
Strange Schemes of Ran*
dolph Mason, The, 505
Strange Stories of a Detec*
tive, 406

Stranger and Afraid, A,
249, 388

Street, Cecil John Charles,

497

Stribling, T. S., 479, 480,

507

Strong, L. A. G., 538
Strong Poison, 209, 210,
212, 425, 506
“Studies in the Literature
of Sherlock Holmes,”

456

Study in Scarlet, A, 20, 47,
92* 93* 149. 312, 317^ 377»
378, 461, 472, 522
Sunset Over Soho, 505
Suo Figlio, 64
Susanna, 19, 42, 74, 82, 354
Suspect, The, 301
Suspense, 307

Suspense Stories, 248
Suspicion, 300, 503, 540
Sutton, George, 203
Sweepstake Murders, The,
500

Talbot, Hake, 507
“Tale of the Nun’s Priest,
The,” 43

Tales From a Rolltop
Desk, 483

Tales of Crime and Detec*
tion, 74

Tales of Detection, 497
Taste for Honey, A, 502
Taylor, Deems, 503
Taylor, F. Sherwood, 447-

450

Taylor, Isabelle, vi, 292-

297

Taylor, Phoebe Atwood,
492 * 495

Teeth of the Tiger, The,
474 » 504

Teilhet, Darwin, 247
“Tell-Tale Heart, The,”
160

Tellet, Roy, 489
Templar, Simon {see also
Saint, The), 411, 484
Temple, Evelyn, 30
Terhune, Wade, 102
Terrall, Robert, 247
Theden, Dietrich, 63
Theseus, 43

Thief in the Night, A, 503
Thin Man, The, 301, 304,
37 o> 53 o> 540
Thing at Their Heels,
The, 57, 464

Thinking Machine, The,

50. 471

Thinking Machine on the
Case, The, 50, 481
Thirty-Nine Steps, The,
87, 56, 65, 144, 45 S. 499
Thirty Years a Detective,
487

Thomson, Basil, 490
Thomson, H. Douglas,
128-145, 408, 456, 457,

458.459

Thorndike, Russell, 501
Thomdyke, Dr. John, 7,
19, 22> »8, 30, 41, 48, 49,

Index

564

Thomdyke, (Continued)
50* 77^ 90* 97* 112,

117, 118, 126, 127, 195,
404, 409, 413, 462, 463,
465»473» 479

“Thou Art the Man,” 73,
82, 164, 165, 457, 505
Thou Shell of Death, 434
Thousand Nights and a
Night, The, 43
Three- Act Tragedy, 434
Three Coffins, The, 273,

499

Three Exploits of M.
Parent, 458

Three Hostages, The, 56,
140

Three Musketeers, The,

Three Taps, The, 58, 67
“Three Tools of Death,
The,” 138

Thrilling Stories of the
Railway, 471, 482
Thursday Turkey Mur-
ders, The, 238
Thwing, Eugene, 497
Tillett, Dorothy Stock-
bridge, 507

Tilton, Alice, 492, 495
Time to Die, A, 503
Tinker, 80
Tish, 484

Titles to Fame, 208
Toast to Tomorrow, A,

500

Tom Fox, or the Revela-
tions of a Detective, 468
Too Many Cooks, 507
Tower of Sand, 483
Tracked and Taken, 470
Tracked Down, 471
Tracks in the Snow, 495
Tracy, Louis, 54, 462
Tragedy at Law, 502
Tragedy at Ravensthorpe,
The, 105

“Tragedy of Birlstone,
The,” 313
Tragedy of X, 505
Train, Arthur, 487
Traitor's Purse, 246
Trant, Luther, 490
Treasure-Train, The, 49
Treat, Lawrence, 537

Trent, Anthony, 66
Trent, Philip, 22, 30, 56,
99, 100, 288, 381, 479
Trent Intervenes, 498
Trent's Last Case, 56, 61,
98, 104, 142, 196, 197,
229, 288, 378, 381-382,
464, 498, 518, 525
Trent’s Own Case, 495
Tresse Blonde, La, 46
Trevor, Glen, 502
Trevor, Lord, 488
Trial and Error, 432, 498,

519

Trial by Fury, 506
Tristan, 74
Triumphs of Eugkne
Valmont, The, 53, 481
Trois Mousquetaires, Les,
44

Trouble at Pinelands,
The, 52

True Detective Stories,

118

True Stories of Crime, 487
Turn of the Screw, The,

38. 494

Tutt, Mr., 487
Twain, Mark, 484, 486
Twenty-Five Tales of the
Railway, 489
“Two Bottles of Relish,
The,” 447, 479
Tyson, J. Aubrey, 65

Uncanny Tales, 73
Uncas, 85

Uncle Abner: Master of
Mysteries, 55, 97
Undiscovered Crimes, 468
Uninvited, The, 302, 371,
494

Unique Hamlet, The, 486
Unnatural Death, 423
Unseen Hand, The, 65,
488

Up Jumps the Devil, 389
Upheld, Arthur W., 507,
538 •

“Upper Berth, The,” 73

Valcour Meets Murder,

50s

Valentine, 79

Valmont, Eugene, 485, 490

Vance, Ethel, 246, 388, 493
Vance, Louis Joseph, 66
Vance, Philo, 33, 52, 77,
117, 179, 189, 230, 321-
326, 378, 382-383, 440,
44i» 442. 446, 478> 507*
525

Van Dam, A., 469
Vandercook, John W., 507
Van Deventer, Mrs. Mur-
doch, 460

Van Dine, S. S., 33, 52, 77,
135. i37> 1S2, 189-193,
209, 289, 321-326, 371,
378, 379* 382-383, 434,
440, 456, 465, 478, 489,
497* 502, 507, 519, 530,
537* 538* 540
Van Dusen, Professor
Augustus S. F. X., 50 •
Vane, Harriet, 212, 213,
215, 216, 217, 218, 219,
220, 425, 431, 433, 506
“Vanishing Diamond,
The,” 478
Vautrin, 19, 66
Vedder, John K., 502
Veendam, S. S., 321-326
Verdict of Twelve, 235,
505

Verdict of You All, The,

60, 465

Verinder, Rachel, 90, 104
Verteidiger, Ein, 63
V^ry, Pierre, 355-359
Viaduct Murder, The, 23,
58, 61, 107, 465, 503
Vickers, Roy, 485
Vicomte de Bragelonne,
Le, 44, 85

Vidoq, Francois Eugene,
162, 163, 175

Vizetelly, Jules Mary, 458
Voice From the Dark, A,
57 * 68
Voltaire, 74

Von Trojanowsky, Carl,

Wade, Henry, 60, 428, 465,

49L 495

Waite, John Barker, 436-

446

Walker of the Secret
Service, 488

Index

5^5

Wall of Eyes, 258
Wallace, Ed-gar, 31, 58, 83,
138, 144, $od, 354, 356*
4H> 414. 444 ^ 455 ^ 484*
485, 488,490^ 492. 495
Wallace, Julia, 501
Walling,^ R. A. J., 492,

495

Wallis, J. H., 494
Walpole, Hugh, 484
Ward, Christopher, 321-
326

Ware Case, The, 60, 98,

138

Warrant for X, 504
Warrender, Mrs., 481
pfas It Murdert, 502
Waters, 407, 467, 470, 487
Watson, J. R., 78, 79
Watson, Dr. John H., 22,
29, 77 > 93 » 94 > 96 » 98 »
108, 129, i 46 ‘ 157 > i 96 >
301, 330, 371,

454. 461 » 525

Webb, Richard Wilson,

505

Weise, P., 63
Weisse Nelke, Die, 63
Weissl, Adolph, 63
Wells, Carolyn, 67, 402,

43 ^» 439. 486, 489* 540
Wells, H. G., 27, 53
Westborough, Theocritus
Lucius, 499

What Really Happened,
106

Wheatley, Dennis, 389
W^heel Spins, The, 507
Wheeler, Hugh Calling-
ham, 505

When Last J Died, 504
When the Sleeper Awakes,

Whicher, Detective, gx
While Still We Live^ 389
Whispers, 55
White, Ethel Lina, 507
White, William A. P., 497,
499, 503

**White Butterfly/* 478
White Circle, The, 204
White Priory Murders,
The, 272

Whitechurch, V. L., 97,
471,482

Whitfield, Raoul, 494, 507
Who Killed Cock Robin?,

57. 61

Who Put Back the Clock?,
21

Whose Body?, 54, 208, 465
Widening Stain, The, 503
Widow Lerouge, The,

459

Wilde, Percival, 235, 490,

507. 519

Wilful and Premeditated,
256, 500

Williams, Dr. John B., 407
Williams, Race, 203, 205
Williams, Valentine, 488,
495

Willing, Dr- Basil, 504
Willson, Beckles, 88
Wilson, Edmund, 71, 251,
253 > 390 ” 397 » 54 L 542
Wilson, Jabez, 149
Wilson, Mitchell, 247, 249,
501. 537

Wilson, P. W., 495, 538
Wimsatt, William Kurtz,
Jr., 169

Wimsey, Lord Peter, 54,
71, 78, 208-221, 318, 369,
392, 400. 404, 423, 425,
426, 431, 433, 479, 506,

525

Winning Clue, The, 69
Winter, Inspector, 54
Wisdom of Father Brown,
The, 463

Wise, Thomas J., 453
Withers, Hildegarde, 368,
412, 505

Wolfe, Nero, 179, 311, 403,
478, 507

Wollcott, Alexander, 226
Woman in Black, The,
381

Woman in the Window,
The, 301, 494, 540
Woman in White, The, 20,
44.89

Wood, H, F.,469
Wood, Mrs. Henry, 86
Woods, Katherine, 494

Woodthorpe, R. C., 495
Woolrich, Cornell, 248,
259. 260, 303, 307, 507,
537

World's Best Detective
Stories, 497

World's Great Spy Stories,
249 . 497

Wrecker, The, 507
Wren, Lassiter, 132
Wright, Lee, vi, 287-291,

489

Wright, Sewell Peaslee,

239

Wright, Willard Hunting-
ton, 18, 33-70, 98, 189,
209, 456, 463, 497, 507
Writing Detective and
Mystery Fiction, vi
Wrong, E. M., 18-32, 74,
129, 144, 145, 456, 462,
466. 498

Wrong Box, The, 21, 108,
461

"Wrong Jar, The,” 478
Wrong Letter, The, 457
"Wrong Problem, The,"

478

Wrong Road, The, 458
"Wrong Shape, The," 67
Wychford Poisoning
Drama, The, 106
Wylder, Mark, 87
Wyldefs Hand, 87
Wynne; Anthony, 54, 67,

479

Year of August, The, 388
Yellow Crayon, The, 57
"York Mystery, The,*’ 67
You Only Hang Once, 386
Young Beck, 481
Yudkin, Dr. John, 423,
433

Zadig, 74

Zaleski, Prince, 84, 413,

46*. 479

Zambra, Sebastian, 488
Zambra the Detective, 471,
482

Zangwill, Israel, 58, 67, 69
Zweite Basse, Die, 63

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "The Art Of The Mystery Story"

See other formats